cyber(b)space notes

Explaining Death to a Toddler at the Taj Mahal

2026-04-01T11:15:00.000Z

Bad Guests

On a recent weekend my family and I traveled to Delhi and Agra. This was a trimmed down version of a "Golden Triangle" tour. As my wife and I planned it out we jokingly started calling it the "Golden Line" itinerary because we quickly decided to skip Jaipur. We did this because we were traveling with a toddler.

Traveling in India is hard. It's hot, bumpy, and always takes an hour or two longer than you expect. The thought of that much driving and stopping and trying to keep our son entertained and pacified exhausted us. So we worked with a tour company to plan the trip, they initially sent us a packed itinerary and talked about "the trip of a lifetime." We quickly put an end to that and had them cut almost everything except a few essentials and made them promise to only make us get out and walk around one major landmark each city.

I hope you'll believe me when I say that I love to travel and experience history and culture firsthand. My wife does too. I don't think we'd be where we are in life if we didn't. However, I don't love holding a wriggling, sweaty, and impatient 3 year old while a tour guide repeats dates and historically dubious anecdotes^[1] at me.

We've had to come to terms with the reality that, at least for the next few years, we will be bad guests in any city or country we visit. We'll only want to see a few things and probably won't remember anything a guide tells us. We've learned to own the fact and allow it to guide our trip planning.

India and a Legacy of Broken Symmetry

The main reason for this trip was to see the Taj Mahal. We'll be leaving India in October and agreed we would be disappointed if we left without seeing it. We woke up before the crack of dawn, toddler in tow, and arrived at the Taj just as the sun was beginning to light up its eastern wall.

Our guide warned us about the swarms of other tourists and emphasized that the queues would soon get much, much worse. We went as quickly as we could after leaving our hotel lobby at 5:30 AM. As we walked around the broad, spacious gardens, swarms of other tourists from all over the world snapped pictures of this 400 year old mausoleum. I was reminded of Don DeLillo's "Most Photographed Barn in the World" from White Noise. I think the comparison is only half appropriate here, though. While it's true that this structure is a symbol which takes on more meaning because of its popularity, it has a deeper history and displays some true mastery of craft that is wholly unique to it. Precious marble from Rajasthan with intricate precious stone inlays on almost every surface.

To me, the most interesting thing about the Taj Mahal is its obsessive emphasis on symmetry. Shah Jahan, who commissioned the monument is both the author and destroy of this symmetry, the reason it is unable to be perfect. After his death, his daughters built a tomb for him beside the one he had originally designed for his wife. They sit side-by-side, but the balance within the structure is uneven as a result. Maybe there's a parable in here about the failure of children to understand their parents, or the impossibility of preserving your legacy after you're gone. I'm not sure.

Inevitably, as the guide spoke and my son began to process the information he was sharing, during a quiet moment as we sat on a bench he posed the question "Why did she die?" He was referring to the fact that the guide had repeatedly mentioned the death of Shah Jahan's favorite wife, Mumtaz, as the inspiration for the Taj Mahal. India's most prized monuments, it turns out — or at least the majority of sites that we saw during our brief trip, are all monuments to death left by empires long since fallen to ruin.

It's a very weird thing to be standing in front of a wonder of the world at 6:45 in the morning, sweating and bone tired after carrying a toddler around for over an hour, and hear yourself — or in this case, my wife — having to explain that everything dies at some point and that's okay. The key in these moments, I am beginning to learn, is to be honest but not overly dramatic. This is probably a conversation we'll have again with my son in a less grand setting.

Later, after we'd arrived back home in Mumbai, we asked our son what part of the trip had been his favorite. He told us it was the ride in the car between Agra and Delhi.

I'm referring to the fact that guides still take pains to emphasize the plans to build a Black Taj Mahal across the Yamuna river and that Shah Jahan died of a broken heart while looking at the Taj Mahal from Agra Fort.

A Request for Impetus

2026-02-24T06:45:00.000Z

One of the most consequential periods of my recent adult life was the Mapbox Workers Union campaign. I was lucky enough to write about the experience in a widely read newsletter a couple years ago. I asked my editors to include a teaser about a podcast a few friends of mine had been working on and expected to release soon. To my surprise and delight, the editors agreed.

However, making a decent podcast requires a significant amount of time and energy. This cost only increases when the project is an oral history. Dozens of interviews, each usually several hours long, need to be sifted through and the best parts need to be stitched together to make something that both captures the attitudes and feelings of the people who were involved in these events and still remains compelling to the people listening along.

My friends have the project 80% of the way there. All the interviews are complete. A compelling through line has been identified and sketched out. They've even done a bit of editing on the early episodes. But the final work of pulling it all together and making it pleasant on the ears remains a daunting obstacle as rent & bills continue to come due every month and other, better paying projects make increasingly convincing arguments that they should be prioritized instead.

As a result, my friends have decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to help them justify and fund this final, hardest stretch of work. If you're interested in this story at all. If you'd like to know, based on in-depth firsthand accounts, what it was like as the campaign got going and eventually fell apart, and you have a few dollars to spare, I'd highly recommend backing the Kickstarter project.

Out of Pocket

2026-02-05T04:45:00.000Z

Rarely are you able to see your home country with the eyes of a stranger. I do think, though, that this is one of the gifts that comes with living abroad for an extended period of time. Any time you return "home" it affords you the chance to see your old way of life with fresh eyes.

We went back to the Chicago suburbs for a few weeks this January. On our first full day back in the Midwest the temperature was -20°F without windchill. A nice "warm" welcome back to the northern climes we've been away from for so long. The local weather report informed us that the last time the temperature had dropped this low was in 2014. At the time, I had been living on the south side of Chicago completing my graduate degree. Despite the fact that I could feel the mucus membrane in my nose turning to ice if I was outside for more than three minutes, it induced a warm nostalgia I had not been expecting.

A Quick Word about the Suburbs

Let me be clear, though: I hold no love in my heart for the suburbs as a geo-morphological phenomenon. My wife spent a good chunk of her childhood here and so driving around triggers fond memories. I grew up much farther from the city and its sprawl, and I've spent my adult life living in Chicago and DC (mostly DC). To my mind, the American suburbs represent the apotheosis of consumption at the expense of all other culture. There are bright spots like thriving community libraries and thrift stores^[1], don't get me wrong. But these always feel more like exceptions than rules.

Funny Feelings

There were a few striking things about coming back to the U.S.A. after living in Mumbai for a little more than 1.5 years.

We left Mumbai at the height of pollution season. Except for a few snowy days, our time in Illinois has been marked by clear blue skies and crisp fresh air. When you live under extreme air pollution conditions, you find your sense of normalcy shifting dramatically. Back in Mumbai, my threshold for whether or not I'll go outside was up to checking to see if the AQI was below 180. But over these few weeks in suburbia, I haven't seen it go higher than 70. Despite the extreme cold, it's been pleasant to be outside and breathe clean air.

When the temperature has risen a bit and the wind chill isn't so bad, I've been able to take walks around the neighborhood. In the mornings, before my son is up, I've walked around residential sidewalks without hearing a single car horn or construction site. I didn't realize how unfamiliar I had become with the possibility of silence.

That being said, there are inevitably some things that I had begun to take for granted during our time in India. For one, my sense of what a shopping mall should be has shifted. In India, they are still very much a class marker and meant primarily for shopping for brand name items. Our primary use for them is having a place to walk around during pollution season or the heavy rains of monsoon. During our return we used the suburban shopping malls for a similar reason: we needed somewhere to walk without the risk of frost bite.

But in the U.S. I am more sensitive to the shifts of mall culture. The primacy of experiences and social media boosted trends are unmissable. Large sections dedicated to pay-to-play kids' adventure lands. Escape rooms. It isn't hard to find 1,000 ft² of retail space dedicated to Labubus™️ and various other trendy dolls I'm not young enough to recognize.^[2]

Culturally, one of the biggest differences my wife and I noticed immediately is just how different strangers' interactions with our son are. This is maybe one of the best things about India compared to most other places I have lived: children are generally viewed as a blessing and a communal responsibility. If your toddler is acting out on a long plane ride, rather than shooting dirty glances at you or muttering about it, Indian passengers will generally try to help you distract or soother your child. In a similar vein, if your outgoing child insists on saying "hello" to people, they won't ignore them or brush them off. They'll probably start up a conversation lasts longer than you're comfortable with as an American. Our flight back to Chicago had a layover in Amsterdam and the shift was palpable the moment after we disembarked from our flight out of Mumbai.

The Utopian Enclaves of Suburbia

I wrote the earlier section ranting against the American suburbs and I feel obligated to highlight the positive things as well.

I would be remiss not to mention that suburban libraries generally kick ass. Not in terms of their catalog, necessarily,^[3] but in terms of their communal space and services. One of the first things we did after we recovered from jet lag was go to the neighborhood library and renew our library cards. As a result we had a steady rotation of picture books for our toddler and a place to hang out when we felt cooped up. Other countries have libraries, but these are usually in the context of academe and not the bedrock of community. I do think that the community library is one of America's finest accomplishments.

Along the same lines, I have a pet theory that the book section in thrift stores gives the most accurate snapshot of the intellectual life of a community. During our time in the northwest suburbs, I visited 4 different thrift stores. In some of the thrift stores, the book selection has dwindled down to a few meager shelves of self-help books and religious best sellers. In the best ones there were large sections of pulp westerns, forgotten Pulitzer prize winners, and obscure non-fiction. I promised my wife I wouldn't buy books while we were here, since space and weight are at a premium in our checked luggage, but I spent $6 and have 5 new interesting, out of fashion books.

Pockets of Violence

Of course, there are several rather large elephants in this post's room. The dark clouds of the political situation in the U.S. and the increased normalcy of political violence. Both of these were very much in the back of our minds as we stepped into our home country. Despite traveling on our diplomatic passports, there was a tension in the air at the border check. As we waited at the carousel for our bags, I counted up the different groupings of CBP, ICE, and other agencies I saw milling around. I wondered if these had been present on previous trips and I simply hadn't noticed.

Once we were deeper into the suburbs, though, I was struck by the fact that all of the news still remained an arm's length away. The only thing that had changed was our proximity to it in both time and space. When news broke about Alex Pretti, we were sitting in a friend's dining room in Chicago. Our friends talked to us about the roving gangs of ICE agents that had descended on their neighborhood a few months earlier. The history of the country is unfolding in pockets near and far. We didn't encounter anything directly, only encountered its residue.

The truth is, I feel oddly absent from the fight against my country's democratic backsliding despite being all tangled up in federal institutions. I'm on the other side of the world and nominally prohibited from engaging in the grassroots organizing necessary to stem the tides.

I find myself unsure of the country that we'll return home to in October. I'm sure the ground will have shifted in a million imperceptible ways. The terrain will be unfamiliar to me.

More thoughts on this further down the page.
It's entirely possible this particular set of funny feelings is due to my age rather than any cultural dislocation. There's a longer blog post to be written about aging out of the dominant culture, I'm sure.
Though I am forced to admit that I have niche literary tastes, so this is perhaps a comment that does not reflect the experience of the broader community.

Retrograde Motion

2025-12-31T11:35:00.000Z

In high school and college I learned that, in a classroom structure with deadlines and tests, I am quite bad at physics. Or at least that’s what I thought as I suffered through astronomy courses. Looking back I can say with some degree of confidence that what I actually learned was that I cannot learn something if I do not give myself the time and patience to understand it in my own terms. Ideas metabolize differently in every mind.

Despite these pedagogical shortcomings, there's one phenomenon that I’ve carried with me: apparent retrograde motion. Where a body in the night sky appears to be traveling in reverse despite the fact that it's still moving forward. It’s immediately compelling for me because it confirms that our view of celestial bodies is subjective and also demonstrates that this subjectivity plays tricks on us. Things can appear to be moving backward despite the reality that they are moving forward.

Of course all of this is an esoteric wind-up to yet another blog that looks back on the previous year. A common practice among bloggers and social influencers. The collective illusion of going backward despite our constant march into the next year.

A quick visual aid.

Tunes

This was the year that Pile clicked for me. Pile's latest album, Sunshine and Balance Beams, is the closest thing to a perfect album I've heard in a long time. They've mastered the slow build of tension that resolves into epiphany or dissolves into oblivion and they deploy it expertly throughout. They make use of string arrangement flourishes, but not in a way that feels heavy handed or pretentious. The songs are lyrically mature but also opaque enough that I find new images and insights with each listen.

Sunshine and Balance Beams by Pile

I stumbled into Geese at the end of last year and I love what they're doing. It's very hard to make something that feels familiar and innovative at the same time and I think they've cracked it on both of their latest releases. That being said, it's Cameron Winter's solo album, Heavy Metal, that snuck in at the end of last year and became one of my favorite albums to listen to this past year. It's stripped down and weird and takes you to places you don't expect to go. Highly recommend turning it on and staring out a window while you listen to it.

Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter

The Printed Word

I read far more books than I expected to this year, 35 in total.

Not pictured: ebooks & library books.

Some of this reading was part of the research for my second novel manuscript. Most of it was following my own curiosity and seeing where it led. Looking back from the end of the year, most of it was good, but there are three standouts.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà

This books is a hundred things if it's one. A masterclass in the evocative potential of a well deployed simile. An exuberant and surreal exploration of the perspectives available to tell the story of a people and a land. Just sublime.

New Selected Poems by W.S. Graham

My encounter with Graham this year was something like fate. Someone, I can't remember who, posted a Scottish memorial with his line "What is the language using us for?" engraved on it. Two or so weeks later I was in an English bookstore here in Mumbai and stumbled across this collection of his work that included the titular poem. Graham's poetry resonates deeply with me as I have been re-evaluating what compels me to read and write. I read these lines from his poem, The Thermal Stair, and I understood a part of it a bit more:

That words make their world
In the same way as the painter's
Mark surprises him
Into seeing new.

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

Any poet who can write a line like "A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck" is worth paying attention to. This epic poem is incredibly well done. Shifting, contradictory symbols. Vivid set pieces and the complex cast of characters that move through them. The steep bill of history that inevitably comes due. Lines from this book still rattle around my brain all these months later.

Light & Sound

One Battle After Another, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

I met up with a group of tech workers in Malcolm X park in D.C. shortly after we had lost our vote for union recognition at Mapbox. Some of the people there were interested in getting their own organizing up and running at a different tech startup. We talked with them about everything we'd been through and the hurdles that would have still laid ahead if we had won our vote. At a certain point, one of the other workers said something to the effect of "It never ends, does it?" So I guess it's not surprising that One Battle After Another would resonate deeply with me. The exuberance of taking action, the unspoken awareness that you are being crushed by an overpowered and intractable structure, the exhaustion, the persistence of hope despite it all. Everything is up there on the screen. Highly recommend this film in all it's zany, inglorious ambivalence.

The Battle of Algiers, dir. Gillo Pontecorvo

I saw OBAA in the theater with a group of friends. We talked about it over drinks, afterward and all discussed the loudly telegraphed influence of The Battle of Algiers. We got together a few weeks later to eat pizza and watch Pontecorvo's classic. I had seen the film before, but really only half watched it while doing other homework in my college library. This was the first time I'd watched it with my full attention. An incredible bit of film history, all the more interesting because of how tangled up it is in the actual history.

Rough Drafts

Another reason for the title of this post is the inescapable feeling that I'm moving backwards instead of forwards with my writing. This past year has been an important one for honing my craft. I've been lucky to have the time and energy to do deep research and writing on any subject of my choosing. I'd like to think I've grown a lot as a writer.

On a personal level, this year has been about coming to terms with why I write fiction and recognizing that this is different from why I want to publish some of my writing for a broader audience. I write fiction because there are questions, feelings, situations I'd like to explore in a style and mode of my own choosing. Sometimes its because I don't currently see any other fiction writers exploring the same things from the angle I find most compelling. Sometimes its because I'd like to see for myself how a well known story might sound in my own voice.

As far as publishing goes, I think the motivation is twofold. First, I'm craving some external justification for dedicating time to my writing. I'm at a point in life where I have an endless list of responsibilities and obligations. A deadline and/or a paycheck (regardless of size) for finalizing a writing project is an effective mental aid for carving out time from these responsibilities. Without it, it can feel quite silly to sit alone in a room and make up stories instead of spending time with my wife and son. The second, more embarrassing motivation, is that I want validation from people outside my immediate social circle. The more acquainted I become with how written words are refined and syndicated for broad consumption, the more I come to realize the truth that any published writer, regardless of bylines or accolades, starts from a fundamental need for other people to tell them their words and stories are valuable and worth the time and attention of others. Without this you write purely for your self and your loved ones.

Despite the apparent lack of forward motion, the work continues. My in-progress manuscript is mostly plotted out. It's much more sprawling and weird than the first one. I'm deep in it and will be happy to dedicate the majority of my energy toward finishing the first draft in between freelance gigs.

The wall behind my work station is taken up by the loose shape of my second manuscript in post-it form.

Keyboard for Hire

2025-11-17T07:35:00.000Z

In 2019, I had the opportunity to see Ted Chiang speak at the vaunted Politics & Prose during the book tour for Exhalation. I waited patiently in line for him to sign my copy and then asked him with a shaky voice if he would continue to freelance as a technical writer given the increased recognition of his work. He gave me a wry smile and said, "For now." Then he signed my book and asked me if I knew anything about Gene Wolfe & his contributions to the Pringles™ slicing machine.

If you've followed this blog at all in the last year and a half, you'll likely know that in 2024, my wife was hired for her dream job and became a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. This job requires our family to move to a different part of the world every 2-3 years. This a classic Faustian bargain, simultaneously a dream come true and an impassable obstacle for my own employment. If a potential employer asks me where I'll be in 5 years, I quite literally cannot give an answer. I might be in Lima. I might be Ulaanbaatar. When we found out our first post would be in India, my employer at the time didn't want to deal with the headache of the time difference and we parted ways amicably the week before the move.

For the first year of this new circumstance, I focused entirely on my writing and publishing. I haven't been idle, and achieved some small success, but I've also learned that the publishing industry moves slowly and paying opportunities are few and far between. So I've had to accept the reality that it's unlikely I will be able to make much money from this work. Certainly not enough to save up for my son's future, or a house, or to keep the family afloat in the event of any unforeseen setbacks.

So here's where things stand: I'm still quite serious about the writing. I am proud of the two small pieces I have managed to publish and I am hopeful and confident that I will be able to publish more things in the months and years ahead. However, I have reached a point where pragmatism must supersede idealism. I need to be able to hone my writing and place pieces, but I also need to be able to earn money and tuck some away for the future.

Consequently, I have made the decision to take on freelance software work. My hope is that this will provide me with some needed flexibility around my working hours & commitments. I'm winding down an initial contract, which went well, and I'll soon be available for more. Details on my skills, preferences, and availability will be regularly updated on the new freelance page of this website.

If you or your employer need something I can provide, I'm only an email away.

When East Becomes West

2025-10-24T10:24:00.000Z

Ruminations

I recently remarked to a friend that traveling abroad after the advent of the smartphone feels like studying biology after the advent of microplastics. It has touched every aspect of life. No matter where you point your microscope you will see its impact.

In many ways I feel fortunate to have experienced life outside my own country before digital maps, smartphones, translation apps, and streaming services existed. Discomfort, in hindsight, is a blessing. It cultivates the possibility of deeper experience and appreciation.

I have been lost on unfamiliar streets. I have had to negotiate with aggressive cabbies in countries where I have a loose grasp on the local language. I have had to rely on the kindness of strangers to meet basic needs or resolve simple issues. Most profoundly, I have been confronted with the limitations of my own culture and language. In the moment these hurdles feel impossible to overcome, alienating even. But those feelings fade with time. What remains is the rich awareness of other ways of being.

The world is large. The variations on human experience are near infinite and constantly shifting.

Even with smartphones this fact still remains, of course. Yet it's hard not to feel that something is lost, flattened, when you can arrive in a country, pick-up a rental car, and drive deep into the wilderness without any pangs of anxiety or frustration. Under no threat of ever being lost. The ineffable sense of that an unseen technological imperialism is at work smoothing out the rough edges of the world. A force that homogenizes everything into a single surface which we glide across, leaving no trace and bearing no mark of ever having been there.

Impetus

Of course, all of this introspection is due to the fact that we took another trip West this past month. As part of our time in India, we're trying to capitalize on visiting nearby countries that would otherwise cost a small fortune to visit if we were traveling from the U.S. of A.

This particular trip was to the Sultanate of Oman. From Mumbai, it is a direct, two-hour flight. Or, roughly the same flight time as Washington, DC to Chicago, IL.

Despite being separated by the Arabian sea, the two countries are linked in myriad ways. By geology, as Oman was once part of the subcontinent before it tectonic evolution rent them apart.^[1] By history, as archaeological projects have unearthed ceramics with Tamil-Brahmi script dating to 300 BCE. And by migration, since similarly to U.A.E., it's local, native population is quite small but the rapid growth of it's oil driven economy has led to large capital investments and demands for labor, of this migrant population the largest subgroup is Indian men.

Oman is not a place that has historically been open to tourism, as I understand it. But over the past decade or so it has taken steps to nurture the growth of this sector of its economy. A pragmatic policy for a country that currently derives 71 percent of government revenue from oil and gas. Similar to Dubai, our U.S. passports meant we received 14-day visas for free on arrival.

Impressions

Having grown up in the United States during the post-9/11 years, I have been conditioned to think of Gulf countries as "Middle East" or the "Near East." How funny then to be in a position where they are the near West.

What's more, as with most trips outside of India after living here a while, it's impossible to decouple my first impressions of Oman from the feeling of "emptiness" that I now feel whenever we leave. The total population of Oman is around 5.5 million people. The estimated population of the Mumbai metropolitan are is 26 million. Anywhere else in the world feels sparsely populated.

Our itinerary was relatively simple: coast, desert, then back to coast. We arrived in the capital and largest city, Muscat, and drove our car East to a resort nestled into the jagged hills of the coast. All around us we saw signs of the economic influence of other nations. Our first resort was a Chinese luxury brand, filled with Indian, European, & Russian families. When we interacted with anyone and they realized we were from the U.S. they were typically surprised, saying things like, "That's a long way to travel for vacation." As we drove, we passed a large billboard thanking the Trump Administration for it's investment in a highway infrastructure project.

In October, the heat of summer has begun to break. The dry climate peaked at 88° F and was cool in the evenings. The absence of humidity was a welcome change. However, the sun was direct and unobscured by clouds, we spent most of our time lathering sunscreen on ourselves and our toddler.

After a few days of sitting on the beach, we drove 2.5 hours South to the desert. This leg of the journey was the main reason we rented a car. The resort was an upscale, glamping operation. 10 kilometers off-road by a small village named Al Wasil (الواصل). The resort said we would need 4-wheel drive and they weren't lying. As I white-knuckled through the sandy landscape, I was reminded of driving on unplowed roads in Illinois after a heavy snow.

The desert in Oman brought back memories of visiting the Sahara in Morocco nearly 14 years ago. Of course, it was also very different. We slept in a room with air conditioning. We had a shower after we stood on the top of the dune and heavy wind filled every crevice of our bodies with sand. A lot has changed since then.

Our one night in the desert we had dinner outside under a sky full of stars. It's been a while since I've seen stars and had the time to look at them. I tried Omani halwa which was different from any I had had before. I enjoyed the coffee that they mix with cardamom powder and serve in thimble-sized cups. As we ate, a live band played local music until an Italian tourist asked them to play "Bella Ciao" and everyone laughed and clapped along.

We ended the trip with a brief stay at another resort on the coast. This one closer to the airport in a development alcove that felt artificial and misplaced. As we drove down the impeccably manicured, private streets I felt another tinge of the hyperreal. A sense of a wealth and incentives that flourish at the expense of community and culture. Places paved over and built up for the benefit of a privileged few.

Sitting at a swim-up bar in the pool on our final day, I ordered a cocktail. A luxury that comes with the awareness that while alcohol is legal in Oman, it's sale and consumption are primarily limited to hotels and restaurants that cater to the tastes of Western tourists.

The Oman Rial is strong, currently worth 2.6x more than the U.S. dollar. Cost of living is high, but not quite as high as it is in U.A.E. Coming from Mumbai, where you can take an auto-rickshaw a couple kilometers for less than a dollar, I balked when a 10 minute cab ride cost me $14, but on reflection this is close to the costs I was used to when I lived in DC. I realized just how quickly my own sense of the value of things can shift. There are reasons goods & services in India cost much less and most if not all are unpleasant.

Oman was a beautiful country. The few locals I managed to talk with were friendly and didn't scowl when I offered a poorly pronounced phrase in Arabic. The cabby complained to me about afternoon traffic on Thursdays because "everyone goes home to their villages."

Subjectivity

It's possible that all of my misgivings about the differences in cross-cultural experiences are not just an artifact of technological development. In fact, it's likely that they're primarily a consequence of the fact that I have traveled more, that I studied Arabic in college, and the traveling to a country where I'm partially familiar with customs & language is inherently going to feel more comfortable than it did when I first stepped into the unknown.

It's also true that becoming a parent has forced me to prioritize predictability and comforts that are compatible with the routines and demands of a toddler.

I've mentioned it in other posts, but living in India under our current circumstances has forced us up into a higher class. Even with our travel to nearby countries, we are staying in places that I typically wouldn't even consider when planning a trip.

Our lives have temporarily taken on the characteristics of wealth and all the privileges that come with it. I can't help but feel like it dilutes the experience of these places. It hampers our understanding of the world as we move through it. With money there is no discomfort or uncertainty. There are fewer opportunities to cultivate deeper cultural understanding.

I'm sure it's a confluence of all this and more.

Back in Mumbai, the city has been celebrating Diwali all week. Apartment balconies are covered in colorful, twinkling lights. Every street corner has a gaggle of people setting of weapons-grade fireworks from 6 PM to midnight. An abrupt, jarring transition from the quiet solitude of the Omani desert.

This fact is courtesy of an official government sponsored coffee-table book on the geological history of Oman that was in one of our hotel rooms.

Do Buy

2025-09-10T10:15:00.000Z

A couple weekends ago, my family popped over to Dubai for a long weekend. Monsoon season had felt long and depressing. We were close, direct flights were affordable, an abundance of travel rewards meant we could get a good deal on a downtown hotel.

Dubai, the small slice we experienced, was hard to put my finger on. There's an uncanny feeling to visiting it. I've never been to Las Vegas, but I've been to The Villages in Florida, and I've read some Baudrillard. There is definitely something of the hyperreal in Dubai.

As our flight touched down, the pilot informed us that the outside temperature was 108° F. We learned, shortly after disembarking, that Dubai also has a pollution season and we had come in the middle of it. The air was a familiar smudged, pastel haze outside every window we looked through. We weren't too concerned, given the desert temperatures we hadn't planned to spend much time outside.

U.S. citizens enjoy visas issued at point of entry. So we passed through checks quickly. The officer who stamped our passports slipped in a complimentary eSIM card before handing them back. He seemed bored, long since disinterested in all of the people who were coming to see his home country. Aware, perhaps, that the city and the country existed on disparate planes. We were entering the city, but we would learn nothing about its history or culture.

I've had never thought describe a place as "overdeveloped" before coming to Dubai. Highways, metro, a half a dozen sky scrapers all with the same realty company name on them. You get the sense that every material thing you come into contact with is an asset in a developer's portfolio. The rough edges of life have been sanded off, the dirt has been cleared away to ensure a good experience for the customer.

Maybe that's what you are when you visit Dubai for a weekend. Not a tourist, but a customer.

This impression might be colored by the fact that we didn't plan any activities outside of the Dubai Mall. In Borges's short story, The Library of Babel, he describes a universe in the form of a library that contains all possible books. The Dubai Mall is Capitalism's version of this. A place in which all possible consumer brands have storefronts. Any sellable item can be found if you wander through the corridors long enough.

The first day were in the city, we walked from our hotel to the mall in an air-conditioned pedestrian walk way. We used a self-checkout stall to buy a burger at Shake Shack without having to to talk to anyone. In the middle of the mall there is a three-story tall aquarium. After we ate, we wandered across the vast valley of consumption to it. The Burj Khalifa watched over us through a well-placed skylight.

As we watched the activity in the water, two scuba divers swam across the expanse of the aquarium with an ad banner in their hands. I looked at the hundreds of fish, rays, and sharks swimming around as a frenzied crowd took pictures and pointed. And I thought about the mind-boggling amount of human labor, logistics, and engineering it takes to put a fish in the middle of the desert and keep him alive.

The Quarry of Thought

2025-08-25T07:40:00.000Z

In the critically acclaimed, but somewhat uneven, movie The Brutalist there is a visually striking scene where two of the main characters visit a marble quarry in Italy. Horrible things happen at the quarry that make a bit of a heavy handed point about dedication to a creative vision and the inherent exploitation that occurs when you depend on capital to realize that vision. Setting that dénouement aside, though, what has stayed with me after seeing the film is a fascination with the process of extracting these geological formations and turning them into discrete, valuable objects.

The result is that I have been on YouTube watching footage of marble quarries. For instance:

Lately I've been thinking about the purpose of this blog. Who do I write it for? Why do I spend time arranging these words and putting them out into the world? This thought crops up every now and then as I publish different things and inevitably have fleeting thoughts about audience.

If you're here for my writing about my little bespoke tech projects, you'll be disappointed by how much I write about the experience of living abroad. If you're here for the travel writing, you'll be alienated by the overly-specific tech writing. And if you're here for my in-depth explorations of the history of niche book blurbs, then you've spent the last two years extremely disappointed whenever you check this site.

In short, every time I publish any writing here the thought "who is this for?" flashes through my mind. The short answer is mostly myself, but it's a bit more complicated than that. While I have looked at and appreciated the idea of "a digital garden," it doesn't feel quite right for my approach. I'm not returning to these posts and updating them or refining the points I've made. It's true that certain themes might emerge over time as I revisit a topic or idea, but I cringe at the idea of calling it a "knowledge system."

And so, minor obsessions and questions about purpose have collided and created an idea. The best metaphor for this blog is as a "quarry" for my thoughts.^[1] As life continues to unfold, thoughts and ideas inevitably build up and layer over time. They create unexpected patterns that I don't fully comprehend and want to get a better look at. At its best this blog is a means of extracting and refining sections of this build up. Somewhere that a chunk of thought can be pulled out and examined in the light. If it doesn't have too many flaws, maybe I'll trim it down and polish it and show it off to other people.

Of course, sometimes you cut out a 100 ton block and it breaks into a bunch of unusable pieces. This is why I don't consider this a garden, my draft folder is a pile of unusable scrap that I might grind down and try to turn into something else, but it's certainly not something I'm going to post up and try to nurture into maturity.^[2]

If you watched the video and you're still with me, I'll just close by saying my role at the quarry is fairly fluid. Sometimes I am the slow, diamond-bit chainsaw methodically making deep cuts into the mountain. Sometimes I am the lithe Italian man staring at an immense block and doing my best to mark what's good enough to keep and what should be discarded. Often times, I am the out-of-place public television host asking rote questions about what exactly is going in this area.^[3]

In any case, if you're here, I'm glad you find the quarry interesting enough to have a look around. Please mind your step and watch your head as you finish the rest of your tour.

I am aware that other types of quarries exist and that the extractive processes the use and their end products might cause this metaphor fall apart. At the risk of some metaphorical elitism, I'm choosing to focus specifically on marble quarries.
I also appreciate using the term "quarry" because it has multiple meanings and sometimes when writing for this blog, it does feel like I am hunting some elusive thought.
When YouTube disappears or this video is no longer available, this paragraph will become inscrutable.

A Year of Antipodal Observations

2025-08-14T10:30:00.000Z

Ages ago, in 2008, I took a series of planes from Chicago, Illinois to Paris, France. On the final leg of the trip, a British woman sitting next to me read a book called A Year in the Merde and chuckled to herself while I struggled not to panic about the year ahead.

This time last year, my small family and I were on a plane pointed in the direction of Mumbai. We ultimately landed in the early hours of August 16, 2024. We arrived exhausted. All of us pushed to our personal limits. Our dog Myron had been obstinate and refused to pee during the layover in Amsterdam, so when we finally made it through customs and stepped out of the airport it was the first time he had gone since we left DC +26 hours earlier. Delirious and slightly dissociating, my wife and speculated about canine kidney infections as we wrestled our toddler into a car seat that couldn't be properly anchored into the van that picked us up because we couldn't figure out how to tighten the unfamiliar seatbelt design.

These two moments run in interesting parallels in my mind. When I was younger, trapped in a small town and fixated on making it to the world beyond rural Illinois, I never would have expected the winding course my life would take. Leaving Illinois to live as an exchange student was a leap of faith, a step into an unknown and daunting world. Leaving DC was very much the same, only I had accumulated a vast array of experiences and responsibilities in the time between those two flight plans. The opportunities felt the similar, but this risks felt so much higher.

Inexplicably, but inevitably, a year has passed since we first stepped off that plane and into India. Even more surprising, we have found our way into a rhythm of life here.

To mark the year gone by, I want to spend some time articulating the experience so far and cataloging the current state of my impressions. As a result, this is quite a long and winding post. Hope you don't mind, but if you do, don't worry you can close the tab and I'll have some shorter posts up for you later this month or early next.

Sense of Place

India is a country of extremes and contradictions. I'm not the first to say it, but every day of our time here affirms and complicates this understanding.

Mumbai, in my limited experience, is a good entry point for a Westerner into India. It is still a megacity and it still exists within the system of Indian culture and expectations. Undeniably, it is chaotic and overwhelming when you first encounter it. But it is also cosmopolitan enough that you usually aren't the first American that people have seen. You are not by default an object of curiosity when you move through it.

The city is also connected to global economic forces in a way that grant you access to familiar, Western comforts if you want to seek them out, e.g. H&M, pizza, Tim Horton's, KFC, Coldplay, &c. That being said, quotidian life can still challenging in novel ways. It is not, generally, a "walkable" city in the same sense I might use the term — though people are constantly walking everywhere in it. We've traveled a modest amount within Indian, trips deeper into our state (Maharashtra) and down south (Goa & Kerala), and these trips have affirmed this sense that Mumbai sits almost as an intermediate point on a spectrum with the U.S.A. and India on either end.

I have also been struck, during this past year, by the stark contrast between my past experience as a youth exchange student and living abroad as a member of a U.S. Foreign Service household. Youth exchanges, especially ones organized like the Rotary International Youth Exchange, are designed very explicitly to force you into continuous, immersive contact with a non-native culture. Whereas the Foreign Service stations you abroad to serve a particular function of the U.S. Federal Government. The result is, at least for this initial post, that we are relatively insulated from deeper contact with Indian culture. Contact with it, outside of some of our basic needs and functions, is entirely optional. In fact, due to the nature of the job, at certain points accommodations are made for our American expectations^[1] and comfort. As a result, after a year of living here I have not learned very much Hindi or Marathi or gotten any better at making sure I'm not accepting things with my left hand or pointing with my finger.

Of course some of this is partly the result of colonial legacy, I haven't had to learn or use much Hindi or Marathi because English is so commonly understood and spoken — even if somewhat begrudgingly. Devanagari has a unique numeral system, but license plates and price tags are all in the Arabic numerals I'm familiar with. After I became more familiar with the Devanagari writing system, I discovered that most of the words I encounter when I'm out and about in the city — typically in commercial areas — are transcribed English words or brand names (ref. Pret à Manger).

The other unmistakable variable in this equation is the ubiquity of technology, which has developed substantially since I was 18 years old. Ride hailing apps, like Uber and Ola, mean I don't have to flag down or haggle with cab drivers that might try to mark up the fare when they see my complexion. India has an abundance of delivery services, so if I want food or groceries or fresh milk set at my doorstep in the morning, all I have to do is open an app and tap a button. Even services that aren't well established online have a WhatsApp number that I can message and ask to send me something, whether its a subscription or a printed copy of a manuscript.

In India, if you have the money, there is an entire army of gig workers or jobbers at the ready to meet your every whim. Often times within minutes. There is so little friction. So little need to leave the house and interact with the world outside. And then when I do, any risks of misunderstanding or discomfort can be addressed beforehand. Everything is easier, then, but the opportunities to experience, learn, or grow all diminish as a result.

Of course, I might be oversimplifying to a degree. One of the great challenges of this past years has been learning to accept that I might never be comfortable with certain aspects about our time here.

First, as a friend here said a few months after arrival, living in India on an American salary (or savings) is "cosplaying as rich." And this is a thought I keep coming back to. By mere virtue of our presence and its context, we are near the top of a large social and economic pyramid. We live a few kilometers away from Dharavi, but we can also take a 15 minute Uber ride and eat sushi next to a Bollywood celebrity. It's a weird bundle of contradictions, and it's hard not to wallow in the knowledge that my mere presence legitimizes or enforces this social disparity that I benefit from.

It's also something that constantly creeps into the mundane moments of life here. When our apartment building's water reserves run low for whatever reason, they hook up a water tanker truck to the system to make sure supply can keep up with the demand. You can always tell when this happens because water from the faucets will suddenly have a very distinct fungal or metallic smell. Sometimes I detect the smell when I am under the shower. I usually sigh and finish up a bit faster. But this impulse is inevitably followed by the knowledge that a large portion of the population here has limited access to clean water, and a very large portion of them only have access through this same system of water tankers that come to their residential areas once a week.

Second, there is the environment, or nature and all its consequences. We're just coming out of our first full monsoon season here. I've learned that during the long runs of gray, rainy conditions, if I'm not careful I develop whatever the monsoon version of seasonal affective disorder is. I mope around, I can see no good in anything, I think that maybe it would be better for us all if the world just suddenly ended. I have a similar reaction in the winter months when pollution descends on the city and sits heavy.^[2]

I won't dwell too long on these points. But one final thing worth noting is that since we've been here we can't help but notice that we are constantly sick. Even more than when my son first started daycare in DC. I think this is partly just a feature of living in such a densely populated city. I can't leave the house without coming into contact with hundreds of people. If I were a 19th century doctor, I would probably just chalk it up to my delicate Western constitution.

Despite these things, there are some aspects of life where a newfound sense of comfort has genuinely surprised me. For one thing, while the incessant presence of other people in very large numbers was initially incredibly jarring, it now feels fairly commonplace. The apartment complex we live in probably has twice as many people in it as the town I spent most of my childhood in, and that doesn't give me much pause anymore. Auto-rickshaw rides which felt like a dangerous novelty are now just a cheap and fast way to get anywhere that's 10 to 15 minutes away. I've even learned to lean into the expectations around high touch customer service. When I'm at a shop and someone hovers and asks questions, I tell them what I'm looking for and am more open to their suggestions. I have the sense that going back home I will feel like the staff at grocery, book, or apparel stores are ignoring me.

At this point in this meandering and complicated experience, there are also things that I have truly come to appreciate. A fresh dosa with chutney and sambar for breakfast. A well made cold coffee. A good vada pav with chutney and green pepper. I also love that Mumbai is a city with two distinct personalities, the one you see during the day and the more lively one you only see if you're out and about after dark.

At the end of all this, I would also be doing a disservice if I didn't mention the impression that India as a concept makes on you when you're able to see it from more than one angle. India as a country is improbable, it almost beggars belief. When you cross state lines in India you encounter different languages, writing systems, cuisines, political ideologies, and on and on. I hadn't realized just how striking this was until we traveled down to Kerala and everything was written in Malayalam and I read that the ruling political party was CPI(M). In many ways, India makes more sense as a federation of unique, independent nations rather than a single country made up of states. Nevertheless, there's no mistaking the unified national identity you find wherever you go. I know I have a tendency to over embellish, but in some ways I think it's a geopolitical miracle that the national body is able to cohere this way.

Sense of Purpose

Turning from observation to introspection, the move to India also coincided with my first break from the consulting and tech industry in more than a decade. If you follow this blog, you know that I've been taking this opportunity to focus more earnestly on my writing practice with the goal of publishing when the opportunity is presented.

Results on this front have been mixed. I've only managed to publish two pieces and neither of them were the fiction I've been focusing the majority of my efforts on. Why is this? For one thing, I overestimated the speed with which fiction publishing moves. In many ways, you have to accept that when you write something, regardless of how urgent or timely it feels, if it is published it will not be read by a broader audience for at least four to five months, and this seems to be the best case scenario for an established writer, let alone an unknown one.

The market for fiction is also so saturated with stories and ambitious voices and so dismally funded, that having no recognizable bylines or any dependable connections means it's hard to stand out in the submission pile. I've chipped away at these shortcomings in various ways over the year. But I begrudgingly admit that it's not something you can build over night. I worry sometimes that I've spent too much of my career high on the fumes of the tech industry's speed and immediate gratification.

At the end of the day, I am writing these stories primarily for the joy of creating. I am a writer and a novelist, though I may never have the ISBNs to prove it. As Allen Ginsberg would say, "All these books are published in heaven." Still a comforting thought for those of us who toil away in obscurity.

Despite the length and depth of the previous section on India, one thing I have learned this past year is that living outside your home country and culture helps give you the perspective necessary to scrutinize it. With both my manuscripts, but particularly my second one, I've felt the space to breathe, analyze, and diagnose things about my American setting and characters which had previously eluded me. Maybe it's perspective, or maybe it's the unique luxury of time and focus that present circumstances have allowed.

Finally, and hopefully succinctly because writing about writing too often becomes an ouroboric subject, self-sustaining and infinite, when I was working a full time job the most difficult thing about writing fiction was finding the time in between all of the life that was constantly happening. Now that I have time, on the other hand, I find that the most difficult thing is the immense loneliness and self-doubt that are inherent in large uncertain projects. I'm inventing people, worlds, and situations that may never amount to more than a little lie I've scribbled down for my own entertainment.

At the end of the day, I can't deny that this past year has been an incredible gift. I don't take it for granted by any means. I know that many writers have achieved far more with far less than this. At this point, I have a few final goals I'd like to finish up with my in progress fiction, but, barring any big breaks or unexpected query responses, in all likelihood I will be rejoining the more structured workforce in the next few months.

On the Horizon

When I first moved to DC way back in 2014, I told my girlfriend at the time that I would tolerate living there for maybe three years at most. I was convinced that Chicago had more and better things to offer. We proceeded to live in DC for a decade, adopt a dog, get married, and have a son. You could say that planning out the future is not necessarily a strong suit of mine.

But the Foreign Service is a massive socially organizing machine, and it proactively splits your life up into discrete, ready-made chunks. We've already been assigned our next post. So even though we still have fourteen more months left in Mumbai, I know that we'll be in Mexico City by Spring of 2027. I'm ambivalent about having a new, next place already in view. In some sense it dilutes the immediacy of our remaining time in India. Nurtures the temptation to ignore what's in front of us and to fantasize about what's to come. But I can say that I'm glad to know that we'll eventually be back in the Western Hemisphere and it won't be so hard to coordinate phone calls with family or plan visits back to the U.S.

Of course, the skeptic in me is constantly wary of any sort of certainty about the future. If you had asked me in 2008 or early 2024 where I would be in one year, my answers would have been laughably inaccurate.^[3]

I will never get over the fact that our Mumbai apartment has a garbage disposal. An object which I have only ever understood or experienced within the American context, and which my Polish in-laws still consider to be an insane and impractical appliance.
I wrote more about this over in AQ-Aïe and Lost in the Haze.
I won't even mention 2019, the most extreme example of this tendency.

Pencil Me In

2025-07-15T11:45:00.000Z

This week I learned that my good friend and close confidant, Myron, has celebrated his first full monsoon season by contracting a fungal skin infection. As a result, my main job for the next few weeks is lurching through Mumbai traffic for multiple vet visits and managing a rigorous medication & bathing schedule.

This isn't a post about vet services in Mumbai, so I won't digress. But it is worth mentioning that every concern I've raised with our vet about Myron has resulted in no fewer than 2 visits to the clinic and an average of 5 different recommended medications. For comparison, in the US I lived 4 blocks from the vet and would maybe take him there once or twice a year? I think it's a combination of India's high touch approach to customer service and a cultural tendency to take the stewardship of animal well being very seriously.

Pondering the cruel twists of fate that led him to this point.

What does all this mean for you? Glad you asked! On the days like today, when I've spent +2 hours to get him to and from the vet and pick up medication, it makes it hard to do the kind of deep research and writing that I'm currently preoccupied with for my second novel manuscript.^[1] So instead I'm writing a little blog post, as a treat.

Writing with Pencils

Working on a new manuscript is exhilarating and vertiginous. Anything is possible! I can conjure any story or character I want... and... oh god, anything is possible. Nothing is done! All the ideas are half baked! There is so much work to do and there are so many decisions to make and each one will do damage to the idealized image I have been carrying around in my head.

If I'm not careful, I can go days on end doing hours of research without writing a single world. It's difficult not to succumb to the oppressive voice in my head that whispers that I don't know enough to tell a story and my writing is subpar and I'll look back on the time and energy I've spent on this project embarrassed about how zealous I was and how little I have to show for it after so many months of work.

Now, I've said before on this blog (ref. How's Work?) that I don't want this space to be swallowed up by anxious writing about my writing. There are a thousand blogs that do this already and most of them are clear examples of writers procrastinating about their other projects. I still feel this way, but since I sank almost 3 hours into carting around an itchy, nervous dog today, I'm bending my own rules a bit. So strap in because I want to share the most effective technique I've found for hopping the stone wall that separates me from the garden of my creative output.

The technique is so simple that writing it like I've discovered something innovative makes me cringe a little bit: I write my earliest drafts in pencil. On my best writing days, I'll sit somewhere with my phone and computer more than an arm's length away, set 4 to 6 freshly sharpened pencils nearby, and start putting one word after another until I run out of words or I need to attend to some other responsibilities.

Looks like the gang's all here.

I haven't spent too much time thinking about why this works so well for me, but I wouldn't write it up if I didn't have a half-formed psychological theory. And let me be clear, it's not simply the fact that I am writing away from the computer. As this blog demonstrates, I have no problem writing up a few hundred words on my computer. To put an even finer point on it^[2], it's not even about writing by hand. I have tried it with pens and ink and the results are less consistent. Even more befuddling, it doesn't seem to be necessary for any iterating or revising of subsequent drafts. It's only necessary when wrestling with that first blank page.

With all these caveats in mind, I think that pencils are proving useful here because they: 1) implicitly hold the promise of impermanence, and 2) give me a material sense of the progress of my work.

In the case of the former, I can write as much garbage as I want and I know that I can erase it. I don't actually circle back and erase too much in my drafts, and as I'm going I actually have a tendency to just scribble things out if they don't feel right. But the knowledge that I can erase would appear to be a necessary a psychological salve.

For the latter, it's visible in the picture above. My approach gives me a sense of progress in the short term as each pencil dulls and I have to swap it out. Crucially, though, it also gives me a sense of progress in the longer term. The more I write, the shorter the pencils^[3] on rotation become and this induces a satisfied sense of the sum of writing occurring.

At last count, my current manuscript is up to 18,200 words. My tendency toward pragmatism demands that I stick with the pencils until the well runs dry.

Summa Mediae

I really don't want this to be all about how I've "discovered a hack" for "unlocking my creative potential," so I'll end by sharing a few things I've come across in my daily life or in my manuscript research that I think you might like.

I could watch this London Review of Books video a hundred times. In it the artist Jon McNaught talks about his process for creating covers of the magazine. Masterful stuff.

I recently came across the artwork of Julie Cockburn. Currently, her practice consists of intricately modifying found photographs by embroidering them with colorful, geometric patterns. If you look further back into her oeuvre, you'll also find some wonderfully striking collage work.

Finally, after noticing that every director who visits the Criterion Closet has made a point to talk about Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors Trilogy, I've finally set aside some time for it. I've yet to watch the final one, but Blue, the first film, was incredibly well done. White, the second film, was a bit uneven for me, but despite my impression the final scene remains iconic.

One nice thing^[4] about being more focused on creative work for the first time in my adult life is that I have more time to follow my interests and encounter the art of others with more regularity.

My first manuscript, a 78,000 word novel that explores how technology and data alienate us and warp our collective memory, is still being queried & submitted. If you work in or adjacent to the publishing industry and think you could help me sell it, reach out.
Pun very much intended.
I'll admit without prompting that the Blackwing pencils pictured above are an overpriced and fetishized commodity. I'd like to think I could write with any old pencil, which is probably why I've kept the Ticonderoga around so long, but I grabbed a pack of Blackwings back in the day — mostly because I liked that the eraser design kept them from rolling away — and I have totally ingested and metabolized all of their clever marketing about materials and design.
I can say this if I allow myself to set aside the constant existential angst that comes with trying to get published for a moment...

Digitally Syndicated Book Reviews

2025-07-04T07:20:00.000Z

This is just a brief note to share that I have recently added a new RSS feed to the website. I've started keeping my book-related writing in a different corner of the site, and rather than shimming all of that back into the main feed, I've opted to set up a new dedicated feed:

https://cyberb.space/shelf/feed.xml

For context and to quickly level-set expectations, these reviews are not rigorous or in-depth. They're here precisely because I haven't put enough effort into them to try to have them published somewhere else. For the most part, you can think of them as the brief note I might post in a social app like GoodReads. I typically type them out on my phone right after I've finished reading and I don't feel the need to revisit or revise them too often.

If you've been following the blog at all, you know that I've been tinkering with how I track and syndicate the list of books that I have read (see previous posts: Bookish Concerns & Shelf Life). So far I've enjoyed the self-managed workflow. There's something energizing about building something exclusively for my own needs and knowing I can change it whenever I feel the urge.

The only sense of lack that I feel, and it's by no means acute, is that this is a pretty antisocial approach to a public reading tracker. I'm broadcasting my thoughts and impressions, but I have no mechanism for hearing what other people think about the books I'm reading. It's a social node that is not plugged in to any network. But that's not necessarily a feature of the approach. If you come across a book review and want to discuss, feel free to ping me on social media or send me an email. I can't guarantee a prompt response, but I can say that I'll read with interest.

The work of setting up a separate feed was pretty straightforward. If you're interested in how I set these two feeds using my static generator, 11ty, you can look directly at the changes & additions I made to my template files over here.

Tu Vuo' Fa' l'Italiano

2025-06-12T07:00:00.000Z

I've been focused on some other work recently. Mostly continuing to query for my finished novel manuscript and feeling my way through a second manuscript that's entirely different. It's new and exciting, there's no pressure to think about selling it yet. I'm having fun!

Last month I also managed to place my first piece of writing that wasn't a personal essay. Please excuse this shameless plug, but it was fun to write satire and have other people like it enough to give me a bit of money and share it with the world.

But this week I have been sick. Head and body aches had me in bed watching old Adam Sandler movies — genuinely surprised at the run of hits he had in the 90s — and using my brain as little as possible. Today I'm back on my feet, but not feeling up for anything too strenuous, hence blogging about some recent travel.

Last month we spent two weeks in Italy. We were there primarily to attend the wedding of some good friends^[1], but we also took some time to visit parts of the country we hadn't been to or seen before. Over the course of our two weeks we went from Rome to Florence, before ending the trip zipping around the Tuscan countryside in a little blue rental car.

Extremities of Time and Place

As I mentioned in a previous post, this trip to Italy was our first time outside of India in around 9 months. That's enough time to adjust to the daily life, to develop expectations around social interactions, and to be — and I mean this literally — acclimatized. So it's not surprising that the experience of traveling and arriving in Italy was a fairly jarring one.

Let's start with the external. We were totally unprepared for the weather. I had brought one sweater with me, expecting that I'd need to use it one or two times, but both Rome and then Florence, to a greater extent, were cold enough that I ended up wearing it every day of the trip.^[2] I had worried, and this trip confirms it, that my time in Mumbai has made me incapable of enjoying any temperature below 75° F. But also, it was nice not to be drenched in sweat immediately whenever I stepped outside.

Traveling with a toddler, I had also been worried that the jet lag would be tough. But as it turns out, the time difference between Mumbai and Rome is only 3.5 hours. Roughly the same as a trip between New York and San Francisco. I don't recommend 12 hours of travel with a small person who just wants to run around and can't be reasoned with. But I was pleasantly surprised that all of us, toddler included, only felt the effects of jet lag for the first two days.

Our flight plan had us hopping over the Alps on our way to Rome

The World Through Stendhal's Eyes

This was my first time to these parts of Italy. Previously, I'd been to some northern cities^[3], and I hadn't been too impressed. But that was long ago and I was a different, younger man. This time, Italy certainly made an impression.

Here's what I'll say, in India when you're out and about, the scenes are chaotic and overwhelming. There's no place for your eyes to rest. It's noisy, hot, and sticky most of the year and dumping rain on you for the rest of it. It is, despite the very real privileges we enjoy here, a tough place to live. So it goes without saying that the short drive from the airport in Rome to the apartment we had rented was overwhelming. The city is beautiful and clean, a living monument to its own history. A history that predates the European discovery of the continent I grew up on, 2 of the 3 dominant monotheistic religions, and the English language (in all its forms).

Fontana di Trevi, only visible briefly before 8am after which it is consumed by a mass of human bodies.

The view of Rome from Terrazza del Pincio.

Inside the Colosseum

Workers for a sense of scale.

Some columns in the Roman Forum.

We did a Vatican tour with a stroller. Honestly, wouldn't recommend it.

The effect compounded when we took the high speed train North to Florence. Florence is perhaps one of the most beautiful cities I have ever been to. Although, traveling with a toddler, we had to resign ourselves to skip the art museums and only do one to two things per day. So, it's funny to say, but our experience in Florence revolved mostly around which public parks we would visit each morning before nap time.

The best view we got of Duomo di Firenze was a rooftop cafe above a shopping center.

Duomo di Firenze from street level.

Looking at central Florence from a nearby hilltop. (This little hike broke our stroller).

Everyone talks about Michaelangelo's David, but not enough people talk about Giambologna's Heracles and Nessus.

Of course, in all these cities we were surrounded by hordes of tourists. Florence was maybe the worst of all, due to its well established reputation as the fertile ground whence sprang the Renaissance. And I used the word "surrounded," but of course we ourselves were tourists and a part of the same hungry beast choking the streets of the historic city. Despite myself, I couldn't help but be reminded of David Foster Wallace on the subject:

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing. [source]

We spent the last few days of out time in the country on a bucolic "agriturismo"^[4] where we watched our son play barefoot in the grass. We sat comfortably in the shade of olive trees and watched as pillowy, unhurried clouds crept across a clear blue sky. Writing this now, I'm jealous of myself and ashamed that I didn't appreciate it more in the moment.

The view of Tuscany from one of the places we stayed.

The Turbulence of Reentry

So now we're back in Mumbai. We flew out of Florence in the early morning and it was another perfect day. 75° F with no humidity. When we landed in Mumbai 12 hours later^[5], we landed in a thunderstorm and our bags were sticky with humidity when we collected them.

It was hard to come back knowing that we probably won't see Italy again for a long, long time. Going from 9 months of India to Italy definitely sharpened the contrast and made Italy feel even more idyllic than it might have if we had come from a different context.

But time moves forward, despite our protests. We're back in Mumbai now, the pangs of nostalgia growing less pronounced with each day that's placed between us and Italy. In less than a week, the monsoon is likely to begin and we'll be hunkered down looking at pictures from this trip, daydreaming about the possibility of another.

Congrats again, Subhan & J.P.!
I am very thankful to the vacation stays we rented for having laundry machines.
If your interested in a very old, very quickly written blog about this from when I was 19, you can find it here.
In English, this could be translated to "farm stay," as it's essentially a working farm that has some rooms for visitors, but the Italian version is so much more than what that translation implies.
There are no regular direct flights between Italy and Rome so despite the proximity, the travel days were quite long.

Goa & Kerala

2025-05-08T09:30:00.000Z

We did a bit of domestic travel during the month of April. So I wanted to take a second to share a rough and ready travel log about them.

Why have the updates have been sluggish?

You may have noticed that it's been a minute since I've posted any travel blogs. There are a few reasons for this. The main practical one in this case is that, when you live abroad for an extended period of time, you start to experience long stretches of nothing very interesting happening. You've adapted to quotidian life and as result you're either blind to the things people from back home might find interesting, or you've already written about them and don't have any new thoughts worth sharing.

As is often the case, these long stretches of nothing-worth-reporting are usually punctuated by big bursts of activity. Visitors come and disrupt the routine. Other pretenses present themselves for getting outside of the little box you've created for yourself in your new country. Such were our circumstances in the month prior.

The other reason I haven't been posting too many travel updates here is because I continue to be focused on writing & submitting fiction and querying agents about helping me place my novel manuscript. It's counterintuitive, but the less writing you see on this site, the more writing I am doing in pursuit of other goals.

Recent trips

When you travel with a toddler, the scope of your adventures become inherently limited in many ways. This is a truth we were aware of, but hadn't really accepted until recently. So, while there are two neighboring states we've visited recently, neither of our trips were as adventurous as they may have been a few years ago.

That being said, we took a trip down to Goa last month and got to spend some chill time on the beach away from the noise and pollution of Mumbai.

On the beach at sunset in Goa.

Just after that, my parents came to visit us, which was a great excuse to head south and explore another part of Kerala. Previously we'd been to the backwaters, but this time we went up into the mountains to a hill station called Thekkady and spent some time in and around the Periyar National Park.

I will say this, it took us roughly 10 hours to go from our front door in Mumbai to the resort we ended up staying at. 4 and a half of which were just switchbacks in a car. Even now, a couple weeks later, if I close my eyes, I still feel like I'm turning back and forth and back and forth.

We saw some beautiful scenery and animals, but I don't know that I'd ever willingly agree to taking that trip again.

On the way to Thekkady we passed several tea plantations.

As I was walking across the resort one day, this Malabar gray hornbill did a fly-by and then landed nearby.

Minutes after we entered the National Park, we caught this Malabar giant squirrel nibbling on a jackfruit.

We saw several Indian elephants in the wild. This guy was noteable because he had tusks, a sign of success for anti-poaching efforts.

On the way back down the mountain, we passed this guy. Honestly, I just admired his rig.

Back in Mumbai with visitors, I had an excuse to check out parts of the city I haven't been to yet. One standout was the Dadar Flower Market.

A morning walk through the Dadar Flower market.

impending trips

So that's it! Hope you enjoyed the pictures and the prevaricating about why I don't post updates more frequently. Later this month we're heading outside of India for the first time in 9 months, which is exciting! I'm interested to see if being in Europe will highlight how we've changed as a result of our time in India.

Bookish Concerns

2025-05-02T10:30:00.000Z

This is bit of a follow-up to a previous note.

The past month or so I've been traveling and receiving a lot of writing rejections. A tricky combination for getting quality writing done. One side effect of this is that I have been tinkering with my website a bit more.

The current state of my digital bookshelf.

Specifically, I've been thinking about how limiting it is to depend on the incomplete and inaccurate data from my reading app to display reading information on this website.

My needs are simple. I want my website be able to pull book information and additional reading data (dates, reviews, &c.) from a central source of truth that I can update easily from my phone. A home-cooked meal, but I'm fine using some ready-made mixes.

Preferably, this source of truth would give me more control over data types, structure, and content. And basically be as close to a spreadsheet that I can download and/or move around whenever I need to move house.^[1]

Notional Work

Ultimately, I opted to move all my reading data to Notion and pull it via the platform's developer APIs. This is not a plug for the Notion platform. I selected it primarily because it saved me the trouble of building out my own UI or — God forbid — having to edit a Google sheet on my phone. That being said, aside from the fact that it's robust data fields feel unnecessarily complex for my needs, putting data into Notion and then pulling it out was an incredibly straightforward process.

An overview screenshot of my private Notion integration.

The largest upfront cost — in terms of precious moments of my finite life — of this project was pulling together my reading data and cleaning it up. I've known since I got off of GoodReads and moved to Oku that my reading data has been incomplete or incorrect. I saved I had to merge and standardize two clunky data sets and convert them to a CSV file This involved some messy scripting I don't care to discuss too in-depth.

After I got everything into one place, there was still the need to do some manual cleanup. Gaps in the data that needed to be filled with the help of my physical records. Once I had everything clean enough, I uploaded my csv to Notion, created an API integration for my personal workspace, and tweaked my github workflow to pull the data and restructure it.^[2]

Here's what the database looks like in Notion's desktop app

Now I'm in a great place where — even though everything is still a bit incomplete and haphazard — I can edit the data directly and within a few hours any changes I make will also propagate over to this website.

Final thoughts

As I mentioned, this current state is good, but it is not perfect. The main positive I gain from this is near complete control over my data. The biggest negative is that I'm currently hardcoded to the data structure of Notion's API responses. If Notion ever changes anything or nixes its free tier, I'll have to spend some time rewriting uninspired code to get the data into my preferred format.

There's also still room for small quality of life improvements. For example, to include in situ photographs, I currently use a fairly manual workflow to add them to the site & then I need to retroactively add the path to my book data. I can imagine a future where I update the workflow to be a bit more automated. Upload to Notion? GitHub workflow that updates Notion pages? Could I use webhooks so that I no longer have to check the data with a cron job?

Ultimately this is another iterative step in my bookshelf building process. I'm beginning to come to terms with the fact that I'm very close to just writing my own bespoke API and front-end UI. For the moment, the cost of keeping the lights on for that project feels prohibitive.^[3] That notwithstanding, I'm happy with this step to have more control over my data and a simple way to update everything via my phone.

Screenshot of editing a book in the data on the app.

You can read this ticket, if your curious about the different paths forward that I was brainstorming here.
I know this is me drawing an owl a bit, but I don't know if this is interesting enough to write it out in detail. Feel free to reach out if you're interested in more specifics.
Who knows? Maybe I'll follow the lead of compost.party and host it on an old solar-powered phone.

In Commonplaces

2025-04-03T07:35:00.000Z

Something I've done since back before my undergraduate days is to reserve a small portion of my notebooks to act as a commonplace book. In practice this means, that I will write down citations and their sources chronologically as I come across them over the course of my daily life. The important thing about this is that it isn't centered around a theme or research topic. I'm not logging these things with any particular goal in mind, nor am I dating any of my entries. The only sense of timeliness is that I know what years, roughly, I spent using a particular notebook, and I know that the quotes are in chronological order. As a result, these pages become an ordered list of influences — poetry, good prose, essays, song lyrics, film or TV dialogue — as I have encountered them in my daily life.

I think that maybe in my old age, rather than write a memoir, I'll just dig into my personal archives and compile a full list of all these quotations that felt important to jot down. They reflect my quotidian life and the variety of things I've been exposed to and internalized more faithfully than my own hazy memories ever could. For now, though, they're a very useful tool for whenever I find myself in a creative rut. Something to leaf through and glance over and see what might cause a spark of creativity or insight.

Here are a few curated excerpts from my notebook that goes from 2022 to the present.^[1]

Is that how we form our personalities, I've wondered. Besides the one we "lay" and display to the world, do we also carry in us some that are still developing? And when we write, do we somehow give birth to these embryos?

— Olga Tokarczuk, quoted in The Paris Review

[P]erhaps intelligence doesn't reside wholly inside the head or the machine, but somewhere in between — in the relationship between them.

— James Bridle; Ways of Being, p.31

What a silly and violent idea, to think that someone could leave the world, and in leaving could make a new one. Don't you know? You're always making the world you live in, friend, right up until the moment you die. And then after that, too.

— T Fleischmann; Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, p.86

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

— Louise Glück; Averno, p.10

But essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

— Susan Sontag; On Photography, p.57

America is a lie. Donald Trump is the truth.^[2]

Graffito seen in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. in September 2023

[W]hatever the degree of the accused's guilt, there has also been the spectacle of a terror by which all of us are threatened, that of being judged by a power which will hear only the language it lends us.

— Roland Barthes; Mythologies, p.52

All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.

— Meghan O'Gieblyn; God, Human, Animal, Machine, p.8

It's not the breakdown of our civilization that we're watching but its blossoming, greed and political corruption it's what America was built on [...] so it's not whether corruption's a sign of decay but whether it's built into things right from the beginning.

— William Gaddis; A Frolic of His Own, p.153

Nota bene: The above is not quoting from the notebooks verbatim by any means. I've greatly pruned the list as I pulled together this blog, a self-conscious act that is absent in the unselfconscious pages of my notebooks. Regardless, it is always an interesting activity to revisit these corners of my notebook and observe what has stayed with me, what strikes me differently after some time has passed, or what might have seeded a thought that germinating into something else in my own written output.

Every non-journal notebook I use typically lasts me around 2.5 years. The one I'm currently using has been sitting next to me while I work since before my son was born.

Glimpses of the World as It Otherwise Might Be

2025-03-19T07:35:00.000Z

Part 1: Toward a Heliocentric Infrastructure

I'm going to be direct here at the start. The world I have known and lived in for the past three decades and change is in free fall. I have pages and pages of thoughts on the present moment that I would love to share, but due to the circumstances of my life^[1] I am not able to share them publicly. Besides, there are better, more qualified writers on that beat.

Instead, I've decided to use this post to introduce a topic that might turn into a series: technology projects on the margins that point toward the possibility of change. Not disruption, change. Projects that hint at the possibility of a better world.

I don't plan to make this post too in-depth or well researched. The projects I've mentioned are mostly proofs of concept and are here to serve as prompts more than guideposts. Think of this more as an inspiration board than a how-to guide.

The Present Shortcoming

The state of the Internet and the infrastructure we use to run it are frustratingly fragile and unimaginative. Modern civilization, in its current shape, could not survive without the networked exchange of information across the globe. If the entire internet were to go dark, the entire game (i.e. global civilization) would grind to a halt.^[2]

Despite this extreme dependence, our means of maintaining the network continue to be crude and unimaginative — the last few decades of "innovation" have led to huge pockets of centralization for the computational infrastructure that stores and serves the data we need.

Rather than building our confidence in the system by ensuring it is a web of countless nodes that can withstand the chaos of the world, we have turned the problem over to monolithic companies that abstract away the details and tell us not to worry. A team of highly paid experts is focused ensuring the data center's resilience to any force majeure that might occur.

What Gives Me Hope

Faced with this bleak status quo, I find myself gravitating to projects that reject the necessity of sprawling server farms and their outsized energy demands. These are artifacts of centralization and the biases created by their own success. Despite the shadow of the current monolith, it is possible to cultivate an approach to networked computers that recognizes their connection to the physical world and seeks to work in harmony with it, rather than subjugate it.

Here are just a few of the projects that speak to this possibility.

Alternative Hosting

When the internet was first invented, computation and connectivity were bulky, cumbersome technologies. This has changed, but the common approach to the internet remains needlessly tied to the patterns dictated by initial constraints.

compost.party is a fun little experiment that I learned about via Mastodon. It's not much more than a proof of concept, but it shows that a small website can be run and hosted on an old cell phone whose only power source is a battery and a small solar array that plugs directly into the phone. For a lot of the independent web, like this website you're currently reading, you shouldn't need much more than that.

Imagine a world where lightweight personal websites are hosted on cell phones. It almost makes the act of visiting the website more personal, doesn't it? The knowledge that the page you're viewing might be hosted on a device I carry with me everywhere I go.

Alternative Power

The specter of energy-demand haunts the pervasive success of the Internet. But it's so abstracted away that by the time you load a website on your phone, you're not thinking of how many server racks it took to support DNS, load balancers, or the web server(s) that ultimately handed the information back to you; let alone where the electricity required to keep these resources available 24/7 was generated.

LOW←TECH MAGAZINE is an excellent publication that does a great job of pushing through the many, obfuscating abstractions of modern technology and exploring legitimate alternatives to the status quo. For the purposes of this post, I find the write ups of how they set up their solar powered website and how to build a small solar power system endlessly inspiring. Not only are they calling attention to the need to power the web using alternative energy sources, they have taken the time to outline in painstaking detail how you could build your own DIY system to maintain that power and put it into practice themselves.

It is possible to shift away from power-hungry data centers and monopolistic hosting providers. The materials and knowledge are available to your average dilettante. All we need is the Sun and the will to change.

Alternative Structures

Currently the modern internet is built around speed. This is reflected in the protocols that determine how to serve us content. If you request a web page that is hosted on a platform with multiple servers in different parts of the world, the DNS server you ping will point you in the direction of whatever service will respond fastest. This is usually whichever server is closer to you.

When your only concern is the speed with which the information is returned, this approach is logical and straight forward, but it comes at a greater and greater cost.

The Solar Protocol project reimagines how we store and retrieve data. Rather than constantly burning energy to keep servers on and ready at all times, what if our network protocols prioritized the presence of the Sun and the energy it shares with us freely every day?

The spin of the Earth dictates the cadence and rhythm of life for the natural world. This has always been the case. Why should the network we've built to sustain our way of life try so hard to reject this reality?

The Imperative

The guiding light of this post is that imagining new, alternative structures is not just a fun thought experiment, it is the obligation of any technologist of good conscience. Especially as existing structures are crumbling.

I've written about this before, a bit more obliquely, but the fact remains.

As the spouse of diplomat living abroad, any public speech is bound by the Hatch Act of 1939
I'm simplifying for the sake of increasing the dramatic stakes in this piece. But despite this caveat, you don't need to look too far into the past to see that even a partial outage of some of the machines we plug into the Internet can cause extreme disruption of the status quo.

Lost in the Haze

2025-03-05T10:03:00.000Z

This is a follow-up to a previous post.

The air quality continues to have its ups and downs here in Mumbai. Most days I get all of the negative health consequences of being a smoker without any of the fun. It's been odd to realize how you can adjust to this type of environment as a human. When we had our first heavy pollution days after moving here, it felt overwhelming and bleak. In more recent days, when I've checked my AQI app and seen that it's a mere 150 outside, I've had the thought, "not bad, maybe I should venture out." The human mind is perhaps too adaptable.

Back in December, during some of the worst air quality days so far, I wrote a blog post about the experience. I included a small widget at the end of my blog that showed the latest AQI reading, to help illustrate the point. However, the AQI integration has since become obsolete. Not because the issues have been proactively addressed. But because the API I was pinging to get real time data relied on U.S. State Department sensors. On Tuesday, March 4th, 2025, the global network of sensors was disconnected from the public API. The API still returns a 200: OK response, but the response body contains no data.^[1]

As a result, my initial page no longer displays the AQI it retrieved when the site was last built and deployed. I have lots of thoughts and feelings about this. Unfortunately, the Hatch Act of 1939 prohibits me from sharing them here. The only thing I will say is that me and my family are still here breathing this air, and it will continue to impact us regardless of whether or not we know its corresponding index value.

A 410 would have been preferred, or even a 451, but this does not seem like an appropriate time to quibble about protocol correctness.

Ways of Seeing

2025-02-12T07:55:00.000Z

I went to the movie theater in India for the first time last month. I've been living right next door to Bollywood for 6 months, I apologize that it took me this long. Going to the movies is such a communal thing, but for some reason I hadn't realized just how many cultural differences there would be.

The structure of the theater experience is roughly the same as in the U.S. right now. You order your tickets online through an app before the scheduled screening. When you arrive you show your phone to an employee stationed at the entrance and he waves you through. There is a concession stand for snacks (soda, popcorn, &c.) if you'd like some. Once you are in the theater and at your seat, however, the experiences begin to rapidly diverge.

FIRST, before the film or previews, the Indian national anthem plays. A recorded voice asks you to stand (in English, but this may depend on the theater). A video of the Indian flag waving in the wind is projected onto the screen as it plays.

SECOND, whereas in the U.S. we have standard title cards from the Motion Picture Association about the contents of previews and films we are about to see. In India these are scanned government documents with the signature of the employee who approved them.

THIRD, once the movie is under way, if at any point there is alcohol or tobacco use on screen, a disclaimer that it is "injurious to health" will appear in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. At times, you may not have initially noticed that there is a pipe or cigarette on screen, but these handy alerts will help you find it. Even if it's only being held by a background actor.

FINALLY, every screening, no matter how long the movie in question, has a 15-20 minutes intermission. I think this is a necessity for Bollywood films, which have a typical runtime of 3 hours. However, it's quite an odd thing to experience when you're going to see a 90-minute film.

There's also much more stringent regulation around what can/cannot be shown on screen. Every film must be approved by a government body that modifies the films however it sees fit. So if you see Nosferatu, for example, then you'll see a different version of Count Orlok's genitals. I'm not sure how much this affects the viewing experience, since you only know what's changed or missing if you're able to track down the official certificate, but it feels like it's worth a mention.

I think the American mindset often assumes that we invented the cinema and exported it out to the rest of the world. So the experience must be the same anywhere you go. The truth is that the ritual of going to the theater has been alive and well in Bombay since 1913. It has it's own history and expectations.

Shelf Life

2025-01-31T09:00:00.000Z

Earlier this week I soft launched a "bookshelf" on this website. This first iteration isn't fully featured, but it builds on some of the workflows I started to think about in Dropping the Ocean, and I want to document what it took to make this initial version.

Initial Sketches

I've been noodling on the idea of owning my own reading data for a while now. I first noted down the idea for this project way back in 2020.

My initial plans were fairly ambitious. They included building out new APIs, a dedicated endpoint, and a private front end I could access on my phone to make updates.

This one is from around December 2023. I didn't go back further than that because I didn't want to dig up any of my older notebooks.

In this one from circa August 2024, I'm still caught up on data schema and API endpoints.

When I thought about it some more, I became less convinced that this was the right direction. I wanted a robust workflow, but I started to shy away from baking it from scratch because I didn't want the cost & burden of maintaining a new backend & a front end app. Especially as this work was marinating, I realized that my current tracker app (Oku) exposed high-level data for my lists (currently reading, read, to read) as distinct RSS feeds.

I started to think about how I could do all of this with with an elaborate system of GitHub issues that triggered actions.^[1]

This still didn't feel quite right for my current needs, though. I made the above diagram and then sat on my hands a bit more. In October 2024, I did a bit of prototyping & playing around with styling in a dedicated branch. I liked the results, but I didn't feel confident enough in the data piece to roll with it.

It wasn't until more recently, as I was tweaking how I display the books I am currently reading on the site's landing page^[2] that I realized I could get a bare bones setup of the page thrown together using a similar approach.^[3]

I made a note and decided to circle back when I had more time.

Setbacks

When I finally sat down to build this page this week, I wanted to stay close to the playful style I had experimented with when I was prototyping last October. I reused some of the CSS and even deployed the page looking like this:

However, it didn't take me long to realize that my preferred styling was broken on Safari. Turns out Safari (Desktop & iOS) does not know how to handle the use of line-clamping / text truncating logic when it is combined with vertical text.

I waffled on whether to remove the line-clamping & text truncation, but that ended up making any book with a longer title look like a fat tome and the effect felt poorer for it.

In the end, I dropped the nod to a real bookshelf and went with basic HTML table.

Technical details

So here's the approach I've finally landed on, which I'll try to provide as an overview without doing too much rewriting of what I mentioned in Dropping the Ocean.

The secret sauce is really how eleventy does global data files. I am able to store my currently reading & have read data as static JSON files in my site's repo. Using Nunjucks iteration, I can loop over the items from these files & bake their attributes directly into the HTML that is generated at build time.

In order to ensure data is auto-updated when I add or remove books from either of these lists in Oku, I have a GitHub scheduled action which runs 6 times a day. This action fetches the content returned by an RSS feed & parses it from XML into JSON. Once it has successfully retrieved & parsed these data, it compares them to the data that are at the latest HEAD of my repo's main branch. If the data do not match, the action overrides the existing file & commits the changes.^[4]

After this commit is made, my build & deploy workflow is triggered. Roughly a minute later, the live page has been updated with the latest data.

Results

You can see the final results of this bit of work over on the bookshelf. Here's a quick screenshot for posterity:

I have quibbles, of course:

Book subtitles are included in the titles, which screws with formatting on mobile.
There is no connection to any ISBN, publication, reading journey, or reviews in the data.
The initial nod to skeuomorphism in my original design was fun. A simple table feels a bit bland.

Most of these can be fixed with some work on improving data quality and a new plan of attack for the CSS. For the sake of getting something done & not letting this languish in a draft branch, though, I pushed these concerns aside.

More to come

There's a yawning gap between the current state of this page and what I have in mind. While this initial workflow & design is fine for now, I plan to circle back and tackle a few more things in the future: having each book link to a dedicated review page, begin & end dates for read books, grouping read books by year — the list goes on and on.

I find that scoping out projects as these big, hulking things can be overwhelming to the point where they just sit in my notebook for years. Freeing myself to build a part of the thing, instead of the whole thing helped me make more progress on this than I have in the last 4 years combined. I approach my professional work this way, but this was one of the first time's I felt it so clearly on a little personal project.

This thought was heavily inspired by a former coworker, Katy Decorah, sharing how she built her own reading tracker (here). Honestly, she makes these things look effortless and she's a great RSS subscription.
This is discussed in greater detail in this post.
Recorded this realization for my future self here
These commits are atomic, you can see an of adding a new book to my currently reading here.

America, from a distance

2025-01-23T05:21:00.000Z

I tend to see my native country most clearly when I am away from it, but sometimes I need a little bit of help.

Fortunately, there is a time-honored tradition of European intellectuals visiting the United States of America and having their understanding of the world drastically altered.^[1] I find the work that these encounters inspire endlessly fascinating. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that it took me less than five months of living abroad to pick up Jean Baudrillard's America.

I've always felt that Baudrillard was a literary stylist first and a social theorist second. This slim little volume of observations and meditations only served to fortify that impression. What I found most interesting as I read was how it seemed that Baudrillard was expecting to find confirmation of his already outlined theories of simulation and simulacrum, but instead he found that perhaps he didn't understand the full extent of either.

I'll end with the words of the man himself, with an insight that you'd be hard pressed to find now, with the benefit of hindsight, but which was written in the 1980s:

Institutions all the more solid for deriving their energy from the failure of the prophecy. This "supplemental" confidence never waivers, because it derives from the disavowal of failure. Such, making all due allowance, is the amazing aura that surrounds Reagan's credibility, and which necessarily makes one think that the American prophecy, the grand prospect of utopia on earth combined with world power, has suffered a setback; that something of that imaginary feat that was to crown the history of two centuries has precisely not been realized, and that Reagan is the product of the failure of that prophecy.

— p125

Alexis de Tocqueville and Aldous Huxley are the two primary examples that usually come to mind.

A Visit to the Lungs of the City

2025-01-10T10:49:00.000Z

This week I finally took the time to go on a guided tour of Sanjay Gandhi National Park, the large national park that sits down on top of Mumbai. Our guide was knowledgeable and pointed out where leopards had scratched trees to mark their territory, different plant and insect life^[1], and identified different birds by their calls before we saw them. I don't have too much to share aside from pictures and some brief impressions.

Impressions first. This hike was the first time in these past five months of living in the city that I've experienced stillness and quiet. Once you're in the heart of the park, you no longer hear the car horns or the construction. The drone of my apartment's air filters and dehumidifiers became a distant memory. It was a light hike, nothing too strenuous. About halfway through we paused at an overlook and our guide told us that the park is "Mumbai's lungs." The city is so large, so populated, that if the park didn't exist as a huge CO₂ sink, the city would probably be uninhabitable.

View from an overlook we paused at.

A fun looking tree. It's bark produces a powder that's reflective in moonlight.

The hike ended at the Kanheri Caves, a cluster of hand-carved caves that were chiseled into the hills by Buddhist monks 2,000 years ago. When you set foot in the caves, you can't help but wonder at the changes that a place can go through with the passing of time. Everything in modern life feels so ephemeral, so contingent and fleeting. But my eyes have seen the work of hands that carved stone before my language existed. Witnessed acts of creation that have survived through millennia.

The interior of a Buddhist temple carved into the hills.

Detail of some of one of the columns in the temple.

Buddha at the entrance. Me for scale.

Met some monkeys on our way out of the park.

After the hike, we grabbed a cab and sat in traffic for an hour (for a ride that's typically 20 minutes) and had lunch at the Tanjore Tiffin Room in Bandra — South Indian food par excellence. The meal was great. They let you sample all of their curries before you order the one you're going to have as your meal.

Photographic evidence of the curry sample platter.

When you move to a new city, one hard part is not knowing how to spend the perfect day when you have the time. After this week, I have a better idea of what one looks like in Mumbai.

One standout observation, which I unfortunately didn't think to take a picture of, was getting to see an antlion larva's pit trap in person.

Against the Synthesis of Intellect

2025-01-04T10:03:00.000Z

In his second collection of short stories, Ted Chiang included a novella called "The Lifecycle of Software Objects". Despite my initial reaction,^[1] the core premise of the story, that anything remotely like artificial intelligence would require patience, time, and — perhaps most insightfully — an endless battle against the deprecation of suitable digital hosting environments, has stayed with me.

There is something in this framing that offers insight into the current state of "artificial intelligence" and helps me articulate my own thinking on the subject. Human intelligence is not inevitable or inherent, it is primarily cultivated over time. If we're lucky, this cultivation is done with patience, love, and affection. The intelligence^[2] of machines, as it's currently modeled and implemented is done quickly, using mindbogglingly vast amounts of data and energy, and founded on a false premise of intelligence being mostly a problem of pattern recognition. The result is a fully synthetic product, quickly produced and brought to market despite shortcomings that are apparent to anyone who takes a closer look.

Of course, Chiang has more recently expressed his thoughts about the current state and trajectory of "artificial intelligence" in the pages of the New Yorker.^[3] In this piece, while he doesn't go so far as to say that software will never reach a point where it is comparable to human intelligence — he is, I suspect, reticent to make any sweeping condemnations of the progress of technology, and remains an optimist on this point — he does say this:

"Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new."

Jorge Luis Borges's elegantly subversive short story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote is based entirely on this premise. If this story were instead written about a computer that, when prompted, returned the work of Cervantes, while remaining a computer with the experiences of a computer, it would not be taken seriously. A computer producing the work of a 17^th century novelist would be seen as an act of retrieval or reproduction, and therefore the point can no longer stand.

I think that this is really the crux of it for me. No matter how adept these models become at mimicking prose styles or art. Even if we invent models that become better at "innovating," by identifying historical patterns in art and combining them in novel ways, there will always be a yawning gap for me. Can a programmed machine have personal history? Experience? Can it use these to shape its intent or inform its work?

Even in the realm of total abstraction. If there were a model that were to exist like a black hole, capable of pulling all of human art, science, history into itself and producing some hitherto unknown result. It would still ultimately be a program whose cannot cultivate its own intent, it must be given by an external mind.^[4]

I cannot anthropomorphize the process or output of these models to the point of meaningfulness. My own scope of knowledge and experience may be narrow and finite, but this narrowness contributes to its meaningfulness. It shapes both my intent and the execution of the creative act.

My Pledge to You

This entire, long-winded preamble has all been in service of this: I write because there are emotions, thoughts, and experiences I have had that I want to articulate and share. I see no value in the proposition that a model might help me better express these things. In fact, to suggest that it might threatens the entire premise of the creative act I engage in. Robs me of my own, imperfect means of expression.

This post serves as my public commitment to never use any generative models of any sort to do any of the following:

Give me ideas on what to write
Give me words with which to write them
Modify or summarize any of the words that I have written
Create any of the images that accompany my writing

This applies to all my writing, not solely the writing that appears on this website. I can't promise that all of it will be quality prose or free of errors, but I can promise that it will exist because of my own intention, time, and effort. For my first post of 2025, it felt worthwhile to put this down in writing.

Errata

There are so many other thoughts I have on this subject, like how cryptocurrency and A.I. almost feel like the market's response to attempts to reduce energy emissions. Or how the ultimate goal of these technologies is to allow capital to enjoy the benefits of creative work without having to handle the messy and expensive reality of the humans who perform it.^[5] But these topics are all ancillary to my main point here, so I've set them aside.

It is also worth acknowledging that there are some artists and thinkers out there — I think most notably James Bridle — who reframe the argument in an interesting way. Intelligence, they say, is not some innate thing that can only reside in human individuals, but rather it's a collaboration between humans, nature, and machines. Though I don't find this argument as compelling given the current state of the technology, I don't want to discount it entirely. Sometimes we give ourselves too much credit, after all.

Cards on the table, I found it to be quite a slog. The plotting dragged on, the characters were interesting but everything they said just beamed "I'm Ted Chiang and I have ideas to share via these fictional avatars" at me.
I don't want to overdo the scare quotes, but I do want to make it very clear that I don't give the term "artificial intelligence" much credence. Its inescapable popularity, in my opinion, stems from its rhetorical plasticity, which serves to obfuscate an otherwise deeply flawed product.
💾 obligatory archive link
Look, I understand I'm starting to dance on the edge of an infinite regress here, but I'm not going to wade into those waters. This is but a humble blog post.
If you're curious and in a position to pay me to write out these thoughts for your publication, just let me know.

AQ-Aïe

2024-12-22T10:03:00.000Z

EDITOR'S NOTE: because the U.S. Government has discontinued its global air quality initiatives, the original widget included at the bottom of this page has broken. It's last successful reading was 162 on March 4, 2025 at 7:00 AM IST. You can read my follow-up post here.

We've had a string of bad air quality days here in Mumbai, and it's got me feeling down. I've never lived somewhere where the air quality could be so obviously hostile to living things. Some mornings I wake up and look out the window and it feels like I'm in San Francisco, except instead of Karl the Fog, it's a daily airborne toxic event.

Here's a picture I took back in the Fall of the South Mumbai skyline. Keep in mind, this photo was taken on a moderate day and the AQI the past few days has been approximately 90-100 points higher than it was then:

It's hard not to let this get to you. I miss stepping outside and taking deep gulps of fresh air. I don't think I'll take that for granted again any time soon. I wanted to do something to capture this and how variable it can be. So I set up a little script to pull the current AQI measurement for the city whenever this site is rebuilt & deployed.

⚠️ failed to retrieve AQI reading for MUMBAI ⚠️

Hopefully, with time, this will become a less interesting feature.

confused by the title of this post?

"Aïe" is the french word for "ouch". It is pronounced like the English word "eye".

2024 in Retrospect

2024-12-18T08:30:00.000Z

You may be asking yourself the question, "What is the point of this navel-gazing post? Why not just post a screenshot of your streaming app's "wrapped" stats and move on with your life?" Well, first of all, now that I have a son, my streaming stats are dominated by children's songs. I love those songs & I enjoy dancing around the apartment with him while they play, but I also don't think they give an accurate picture of my aesthetic tendencies.

Second, streaming services have narrow scopes of interest. I get different "wrapped" notifications for music, books, & films. I want to share an overview of the things I enjoyed this past year, but there's no way I'm going to post screenshots from a bunch of different apps. That's tacky.

Finally, and most importantly, I read this blog from Hearing Things and then I saw Tom MacWright's post about making his own wrapped for Bandcamp purchases, and these two well-timed posts kicked off a train of thought. I've emerged at the end of this train pretty adamant that passively letting data harvesters tell me what is or isn't my taste does not feel like an act of self-discovery. Instead, it feels like relinquishing control of my own sensibilities to a corporation.

In light of this, here are my curated highlights of the art and entertainment that I've engaged with this past year. I tried to approach this as an opportunity to provide succinct recommendations for things I genuinely enjoyed and less of a coldly analytical look back at the year.

BOOKS

Here are the high-level stats:

genre	count
non-fiction	8
fiction	18
total	26

I typically aim for about 24 books a year, give or take. Previously I've written about the blend of translation, author backgrounds, &c. I'm not going to dive too deeply into that here. Instead, this section is based entirely on what I would recommend to you if the opportunity came up in casual conversation.

His Master's Voice by Stanisław Lem

I'm long overdue for a write up of why I think everyone remotely interested in technology and science should be required to read every novel that Lem wrote. I read this book toward the beginning of the year and it immediately went into my Top 5 all time books.

Lem's ability to take a common science fiction trope (e.g. we've received a message from outer space) and unwind it in the most philosophically and logically rigorous way possible (e.g. we can never hope to fully understand it, maybe it's a test we've failed) is unparalleled.

The Hole by Hye-young Pyun

Well-executed body horror whose staying power isn't due shock value alone is rare. In this book, you both fear for the protagonist and despise him for how he lived his life prior to the car accident that left him wholly dependent on his mother-in-law's care.

God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O'Gieblyn

A very personal and incisive collection of essays from a writer who was not on my radar prior to this year. O'Gieblyn moves seamlessly between deeply personal accounts over her own wrestling with religion and analytical inquiries into technology's manifestly religious status in contemporary society.

A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir

I debated whether or not to include this one on the list. It was incredibly hard to read. Touched so many raw nerves. But also, it was a deeply profound look at the relationship between a mother and daughter, life and death, acceptance and denial, and how incredibly hard it can be when all of these collide.

Propaganda by Jacques Ellul

This one is a last minute entry, as I finished reading it just this past week. It is also the exception to my criterion this section. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to someone in casual conversation.

My biggest quibbles revolve around the fact that: a) Ellul trained as a lawyer and this really shines through in the ways that he structures his arguments (i.e. so thorough & meticulous as to make you set the book down), and b) I think that Ellul's Christianity dilutes his analysis at times (i.e. causes him to go out of his way to assert that propaganda is possible because western societal values have eroded and morals are no longer fixed).

Setting caveats aside, though, this book was most interesting in how it approached the phenomenon of propaganda in modern, technological societies. One of Ellul's main insights is that propaganda is not necessarily — or only? — an action taken by nefarious actors seeking to brainwash the masses. Rather, he views it as a sociological phenomenon that is inevitable wherever large, technological societies emerge. Fascinating analysis that had me re-evaluating my own understanding of the use, purposes, and threats of propaganda in modern society.

MUSIC

Pedro the Lion

Let's get the overly sentimental one out of the way first. David Bazan was a pastor's son who moved around as a kid. I was a pastor's son who moved around as kid. He's currently releasing an autobiographical album for each town he lived in during childhood. These albums feel like they were written for me. The latest, Santa Cruz, is my favorite of the series so far:

Santa Cruz by Pedro the Lion

Timber Timbre

I stumbled across Taylor Kirk's music completely by accident and I can't stop listening to it. He manages write these songs that can be both haunting and inviting in all the right ways.

Creep On Creepin' On by Timber Timbre

Ana Lua Caiano

There's something special in Caiano's album Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado that I have trouble putting my finger on. It feels like a head-on collision between old and new, and the wreckage turns out to be something wholly its own.

Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado by Ana Lua Caiano

Descartes a Kant

An art rock band from Mexico City, their album After Destruction really transcends the form. It's not a collection of songs so much as it is a sonically conveyed dramatic play. At the same time it doesn't feel right to call it a concept album? I have trouble putting it into words. Regardless of category, this is an album that demands your attention. Monopolizes it. Every time I have put it on this year, I have been absorbed by the story that unfolds. Unusable as background music, and therefore highly recommended.

After Destruction by Descartes a Kant

Late Entries that Merit a Mention

I won't dive into the details for these bands. But I've been in a real post-punk, avant-garde, jazz wormhole the last few months of this year and I've discovered a few great bands that'll probably end up in next year's write up.

In no particular order:

FILMS

I did not realize this until I sat down to write them up, but all of the films I enjoyed most this past year came out in the previous decade. Listen, it's hard to stay on top of my to-be-watched list.

Mandy, directed by Panos Cosmatos

I finally got around to watching this psychedelic horror, revenge film this past year even though it came out over half a decade ago. Nic Cage was amazing, as always^[1]. Even more, though, I found the film to be original both aesthetically and thematically.

The Lighthouse, directed by Robert Eggers

Thrilled that someone is still out there making weird, unexpected films. The cinematography, dialogue, and symbolism on display is some of the best in recent memory.

Columbus, directed by Kogonada

My favorite film that I watched this past year, and to my eternal surprise it's an understated little story that takes place in Columbus, Indiana. The cinematography is exceptional, the characters feel real and complicated, and the story unfolds on its own terms and tugs at your heart with its yearning. Turn off your phone, dim the lights, and let this film absorb you.

I won't litigate this argument here. But I will state unequivocally and in no uncertain terms that I think Nicolas Cage is one of the most innovative and interesting on-screen performers of our time. The movies he is in are not always good, but any movie I see him is inevitably a delight simply because you get to experience what he does with the material.

How's Work?

2024-12-13T06:00:00.000Z

On the Work

I've alluded to this in a few other posts & the main page of my website, but it bears stating explicitly: one of my main focuses for the next year(ish) is to publish my writing. I'm not leaving software engineering behind completely. It still scratches a very specific itch. But if I'm being honest, I prefer the recent reversal of making writing the main focus and software the hobby. My main goal is to successfully place the manuscript of a novel I've written with a publisher, at the same time I've got short fiction and essays I'm shopping around. (Fighting the battle on multiple fronts, I guess you could say.)

Like any work, accomplishing this goal is weird admixture of preparation, connections, and luck. I've made good progress on some fronts — most notably landing my first paid essay, which published at the beginning of last week. This felt like a really big milestone! I wrote my thoughts down and someone liked them enough to give me money in exchange for sharing them with a group of readers. The experience of working with the editorial team at Reboot was positive, and while the essay didn't hit all the notes I wanted it to, I do feel like they helped sharpen some of the arguments I made. It's given me the juice to keep pitching other essay ideas to other outlets.

That being said, I'd like to be more than just an "opinion-haver" on the internet. But the literary publishing industry is a more difficult nut to crack. At the moment, I've paused querying literary agents and opted to close out the year polishing up my manuscript. I'm also attempting, with some temerity, to build more relationships in the industry^[1].

Listen. I get that these goals are not unique. I know there are a hundred thousand people who look and think like me sending the same emails. At the end of the day, though, I feel most fulfilled when I am thinking and writing, and I'd like to share the fruit of this labor with more people. If I can find distributors willing to help me hone the work and then share it with a bigger audience, that'd be grand. Of course, if I make it to the end of next year without making any headway, that's also fine. It won't diminish the sense of fulfillment I get from writing. The compulsion to write is a constant. It'll be here regardless. Failure to achieve things in this time frame just means these goals will need to take a backseat to finding a more stable source of income.^[2]

In the Works

Since I've been so focused on writing and placing more serious fiction & non-fiction, I haven't had too much time to tinker with other small projects. So let me give you a quick rundown of my personal backlog:

Finish building a bookshelf for this website.
§ I've landed on a better approach for keeping Oku as my primary interface, which I mentioned in a previous note. I think this work will fall in place much more quickly once I decide to dedicate time to it.
Write an 11ty plugin to turn scroll to text fragment links into embedded citations with source links.(cyberbspace#168)
§ I don't know that this will have value for anyone other than me. But I think it would be cool if I could just click copy link to highlight & drop the link into a page's markdown file then have it automatically turn into a blockquote element that's formatted properly and linked to that text fragment.
Finally write that travel note about my trip down south to Kerala.
§ Seriously, it's almost been a month and I have photos and thoughts.
Write a personal "wrapped" note before the end of the year.
Publish a written commitment to not use generative AI for any of the writing that appears on this website.
Fine tune my SVG map implementation (cyberbspace#159) & generate an overview map for the #travel filter tag.
Maybe break my rule about only using fonts already on the computer (ref. rule #2) and load up Noto Emoji so that I get my emoji use aligns with my site's aesthetics.
I, rather unexpectedly, won an ebay bid for an antique mechanical typewriter! I'm planning to share pictures and thoughts on it when it arrives in the mail.

Net Works

I tinker with my website when I'm procrastinating on other things. You may have noticed a few changes around here since the last time you visited. Here's a quick run down in case you were curious:

Added a new writing section to the website. I'll include links and info here whenever I publish something somewhere other than this blog. (cyberbspace#201)
Fixed some mobile formatting issues with the navigation links & the notes page.
Updated the home page formatting to be a bit less clunky. (cyberbspace#203)
§ I find this new format to be a bit more legible across devices, so I'll probably keep it around for a bit.
Committed to a single, monospace font for the entire site. (cyberbspace#206)
§ I'd had the serif headers + monospace body since I moved over to a static site generator, and — to be perfectly honest — the longer I've had it the more I hated it. This new format feels aesthetically pleasing at the moment, with the caveat that I'll probably be making some adjustments to the size of my headers (they feel a bit intense at the moment).
There was some extra top & bottom padding in my footnotes and I couldn't for the life of me understand why. I finally took the time to find the CSS rule that was responsible and trimmed those suckers down. (cyberbspace@d4026c0)

Blog Works

I don't intend for this to become a site dedicated to cataloging the trials and frustrations of making headway in an unfamiliar industry. I find that going that route tends to be a sinkhole where I spend all my time writing about that process and not focusing on the quality of my writing. The writing about the work subsumes the actual work, &c. So please consider this post an anomaly.

That being said, this website is very much a bin I throw random thoughts so that they no longer take up space in my mind. I can make no promises or guarantees about the quality or content of future notes.

As you can imagine, this is a bit difficult to do while based in India and focusing on U.S. publishing. I'm feeling my way through it, but if you are or know someone who'd be worth chatting with, drop me a line!
At the moment I'm relying on savings and the generous patronage of my wife.

Ripe for Review

2024-12-06T05:00:00.000Z

My library card back in D.C. hasn't expired yet. This means that I am still getting a slow trickle of notifications for e-book holds that I placed a few months ago and forgot about. I wasn't sure this would work while abroad, given I'm loading them up on my e-reader from an ISP clearly based in India, but — miracle of miracles — I have confirmed that I can check these books out on my e-reader.^[1]

This also means that every so often, I am gripped by panic because a book I put on hold is available and I only have a few weeks to read it.

Such was the case with Sarah Rose Etter's Ripe.

I tend to shy away from any writing that relies on the term "late-stage capitalism" in its marketing. This is based the personal bias that the term is too ahistorical given what we know about the history of capitalism. Put differently, there is nothing very new about the dynamics at play in the system we've used to organize society for the last +150 years. Maybe the industries are different (e.g. software development instead of textile manufacturing), maybe the numbers are higher (e.g. billionaires instead of millionaires), but the assumption that there are stages and contemporary society is nearing the end of a predefined process feels a bit too teleological for my taste. All this is just a long-winded way to say: I was ready to put down the book and return it early if it rang a bit too hollow.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the term was mostly marketing schlock. What's more, I found this to be a pleasant counterpoint its ingenuous doppelgänger, Sourdough by Robin Sloan. In Ripe, the daily anxieties and contradictions of working for a San Francisco startup are depicted more accurately than other accounts I've read. The tension in the story builds and builds until we are left to sit with a much more ambiguous understanding of the world as it is and where it might be headed. What's more, Etter embraces surrealism in a refreshing way that you won't often find in contemporary fiction. It added rather than detracted from the weight and depth of the story.

I don't think I would give a full-throated recommendation of this book to friends and family^[2]. But I do think anyone who has experienced the Bay Area tech scene in the past decade will find this novel incisive and horrifying.

If you live in the U.S. and are reading this, consider this your regular reminder to make sure your library card is active and that you are using it often! Public libraries are the single best institutions created by American tax dollars.
This seems to be a theme with my recent reviews. Not sure what that says about my reading habits.

Dropping the Ocean

2024-11-26T19:00:00.000Z

I have been frustrated with having to pay Digital Ocean $5.30 every month just because I wanted to show what books I was reading on my site's home page. Last week, I finally did something about it.

The reason I didn't do this sooner, was because I have had grand plans to completely re-vamp how I manage my digital reading record. I started down this path & quickly got bogged down in the details of book editions, date formats, ISBN numbers, &c. It all started to feel a bit silly & messy, so I set aside.

Back in 2022 I was steeped in backend engineering. It felt easy and natural to spin up a Node.js server to connect my site to my reading data. Now that I'm no longer surrounded by on-call schedules and availability metrics, I had the epiphany that the feature doesn't need to be up-to-the-minute or highly available. I'm not changing the books I'm currently reading that often. I was being a computational wastrel.

So I've changed my approach. I've now got a GitHub action that runs once every 4 hours to check my reading app's RSS feed. If it's changed compared to data that was previously pulled down, the action updates the data, commits it to my repo, & triggers a fresh site build. You can see the details in the pull request. I like this approach, it gets me closer to where I want to be^[1] without forcing me to spend hours build out a bespoke system. It feels more conducive to iteration, which I've found leads to better outcomes. I already see how I can use this strategy to catalog the books I have read & auto-generate dedicated review pages. I can do this piece by piece until I'm ready to swap out my use of Oku for my own backend. Even better, my book data is now backed up in my site's git history.

My only hesitation about going further down this route is the fact that I won't be able to easily pull my review data from Oku. They hide it behind a series of API calls that I will have to reverse engineer. For now, though, I'm happy that these books & links load instantaneously with the page instead of there being a perceptible delay while the front-end waits to hear back from the back-end.

There's also a small hint of irony about this work. I'm not currently drawing a regular salary from anywhere, so being mindful of expenses is a more prominent part of my life. With the $63.60 I have saved by making this change, I have found the exact justification I needed to go out and buy a few more books.

i.e. managing my reading data myself & baking all of my data into my site directly

Democracy & Doom Metal

2024-11-22T16:46:00.000Z

Something I learned this past week, that I had no prior awareness of, is that alcohol sales are prohibited in the state of Maharashtra for 48 hours in the lead up to the state assembly elections. These "dry days" are observed up until the polls officially close at 6 p.m. on election day. Sales are briefly prohibited again at the end of the week when the election results are announced. The stated aim is to preserve public order and ensure that the voting public is clear headed when casting their votes.

Having a very shallow understanding of local politics here, and looking for an excuse to see a different side of the city, I marked election day by taking a local train down to Lower Parel for a death metal show.

It was a great time. Riding the local train for the first time, I felt connected to the city in a way that I haven't up until this point. Like a microscopic blood cell coursing through an endless network of arteries and veins that keep this hulking, incomprehensible leviathan alive.

As far as the show is concerned, I'm no expert on the nuances of metal, but the bands were good and the scene appears to be alive and well here on the other side of the world. The main opener was a local Mumbai metal band, Dirge and they killed it. I was so warmed up by the end of their set, the headliner could have refused to go on and it still would have been a great night.

But the headliner did come on, and they were just as good. The headliner was the New Zealand legends of death metal, Ulcerate.^[1] They played a clean, tight set despite being just a 3-piece. The show ended shortly after midnight and we stumbled out into the dark streets of Parel. Our ears still ringing and our bodies still humming from the phantom touch of the bass drum's double-pedal.

Riding the train back up North after the show, Mumbai's hooks inched deeper down into my soul. I watched the city in all its haphazard glory glide me by, and a new sense of legibility stirred. It was nice moment of communion with this place I've only called home for 3.5 months. I am a part of this city. It will change me as I move through it. I experienced this epiphany, for the first time since we arrived, as a source of comfort.

I use the phrase "New Zealand legends of death metal" here to sound like I know what I'm talking about, but make no mistake, I had not heard of this band before a friend texted me asking if I was interested in tagging along to the show.

Violence and Derision on Vacation

2024-11-19T09:41:00.000Z

When I was living in D.C. I formed the bad habit of plucking books from little free libraries and then taking several months to get around to reading them. I put new books into circulation, though, and so I rarely feel too guilty about it. Besides, I think that the haphazard circulation of odd, half-remembered books is part of what makes these little libraries a special thing.^[1]

This past week, we went on vacation to the backwaters of Kerala.^[2] I spent nice chunks of time sitting by resort pools, breathing fresh air, and finally getting around to reading a book I had grabbed from a free little library^[3] a month or two before we moved to India — The Jokers by Albert Cossery.

I can't say what led me to initially grab the book. Some admixture of: NYRB classics editions rarely miss, the summary on the back was interesting enough, and the author's background as an Egyptian who lived in Paris and only published novels in French, though all his characters and plots remained in Egypt, felt compelling in its own right.

I expected this to be a light, perhaps slightly dated read that I could breeze through by the pool. Instead, it touched on themes that feel especially pertinent and worth discussing.

Cossery's main characters are not gallant heroes or bold revolutionaries. They don't care at all about honor or dignity, in fact they exploit these self-serious tendencies for their own amusement. The novel's action peaks by showing you that: a) their diagnosis of power & how it sustains itself are accurate, and b) they'll be unhappy if they ever actually achieve their goal of absolute humiliation of whomever is in power.

One moment in particular has stayed with me since I finished reading this book. It happens as the novel's chief antagonist (because there are no protagonists in this novel) is going back and forth with a dogmatic revolutionary. As the debate goes on, the revolutionary stubbornly tries to demonstrate that the antagonist is wrong. The antagonist begins to see why the revolutionary cannot understand his actions or motivations:

He played the game of honor and dishonor, just as he was taught to do. He'd never escape. He was more a prisoner than a prisoner in a cell because he shared the same myths as his adversary; they grow and grow and surround everything like unbreachable walls. [p.114]

This immediately brought to mind Richard Rorty's concept of the political "ironist" and I went back to my old grad school copy of Contingency, irony, and solidarity to search out a passage I vaguely remembered but couldn't articulate.

The redescribing ironist, by threatening one's final vocabulary, and thus one's ability to make sense of oneself in one's own terms rather than hers, suggests that one's self and one's world are futile, obsolete, powerless. Redescription often humiliates. [p.90]

Cossery's main characters in this book are redescribing ironists par excellence. That point is indisputable. I think, however, Cossery's diagnosis is apt but his prescription — or the prescription his main characters proffer — falls short for me. His themes fail to map neatly onto Rorty's idea of the liberal ironist. In order to be happy, these characters must reject any positive notion of the future. They can only revel in the absurdity of the present, because this is the only certainty there can be in life. We see this in the ambivalence the main characters begin to feel when it looks as if their plans might actually lead to the end of their autocratic governor's political career. They're the kids shooting spitballs at the teacher. Their joie de vivre would evaporate if ever the teacher lost patience and abandoned the class room entirely.

But maybe that's the whole point? Main characters are not meant to be idealized forms. The work of the novelist isn't to draw a map to a better future or an improved way of "doing politics". Maybe it's enough to show that there there is something to be said about rejecting the received wisdom of the world you live in and taking the time to revel in its absurdity.

In any case, this isn't a perfect book — so few are. But it is refreshingly devoid of cliché and interesting in its premise. Worth checking out if you happen to see it in a little library some day.

I have dreams some day of making an app where books I put into circulation can do, like, Foursquare check-ins and you can watch them move around in time and space. But that... is a project for another, more rainy day.
I plan to write about this trip in a separate post. Fear not.
I did preemptively put several books into the little library rotation before we moved, so I don't feel excessive guilt over taking this one out of circulation completely.

Pret a Blogger

2024-10-29T09:41:00.000Z

Today I find that I can't help but obsess over the linguistic journey and phonic mutation that this corporate branding represents:

For the uninitiated, Pret a Manger is a British fast food chain. Its name is a French phrase^[1] that means "ready to eat". In the anglosphere, this name is already bastardized to a degree. Diacritics have been dropped and there are no hyphens between the words. Pronouncing it is difficult for English speakers. So much so that it is common to refer to the shop simply as "Pret" and leave it at that. As the chain expands to India, however, they need to transcribe the name into Devanagari. The act of doing this betrays the transcriber's understanding of what the original pronunciation should be.

So we're left with a rendition of the English mispronunciation of a French phrase. A lot of interesting choices were made in the transcription. The one that feels most notable to me is the use of ए to represent both the "à" and the ending of the word "manger". In French, these are two distinct sounds.^[2]

I'm not quite sure why I find this so fascinating. I think because I assumed that transposing a French phrase into another writing system would allow the transcriber to more clearly indicate the correct pronunciation? Instead, the necessity of maintaining a consistent global brand identity^[3] has caused the incorrect pronunciation to escape the confines of the Latin alphabet.

French lends an air of sophistication to the English speaking interlocutor and helps disguise the fact that this is basically the same business model as a 7-11 that set up some tables.
The "à" is pronounced like the "a" in "about", whereas the "-er" verb suffix is pronounced like the "a" in "face".
🤑 🤑 🤑

The Contingency of Perception

2024-10-24T07:35:00.000Z

Every morning that I wake up in India, Mumbai becomes a little bit more familiar and it becomes a little bit harder to remember what initially felt strange. This is a normal part of the process for adjusting to any new environment. But in a place that felt so distinct when I first arrived, I think it's important to keep track of the things that I have felt most distinctly in theses first few months. So here is a non-comprehensive list. Presented in no particular order.

Car horns are conversational, not (typically) confrontational

The sound of car horns is omnipresent in Mumbai. You hear them even when you aren't in a car or out walking on the street. When you first arrive, it's a cacophony that can quickly start to feel overwhelming. I think that's because in US cities, we use the horn to signal extreme situations.

After a few months, I've come to see the use of horns as conversational, and this has helped me adjust to their constant presence immensely. The rules of the road are fluid and dynamic. Traffic in Mumbai seems to lend credence theories of social constructionism rather than functionalism.

Language is fairly limited when trying to describe the sound of traffic, though. In keeping with the ethos of some of my previous posts, here's a field recording:

Looks like your browser doesn't support this (surprising!). You can diretly download the mp3 here

Intersections do not have crosswalks or pedestrian signals

This one is maybe the most surprising for me personally. I was shocked to see pedestrians walking in the street, negotiating space with cars, auto-rickshaws, and motorbikes as if it were completely normal. Crossing the street at intersections that had no stoplights or crosswalks. But just yesterday, I walked around several neighborhoods, crossed the street and negotiated space with vehicles, and it started to feel perfectly natural.

The author & philosopher Stanisław Lem once wrote the following:

Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality.^[1]

Of course, Lem was making a very different, more cynical point about blind faith in human technological progress, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about this when I explore Mumbai on foot. It flashes through my mind every time I step into the street here and realize I'm less worried for my safety than I was the last time I did.

English is a marker of social status

I had assumed, rather naïvely, when I first came to India that I would be able to get around with English, but in most social situations it would be ideal to be able to speak a little bit of Hindi. But I've come to see that English is not simply a lingua franca here. It's also a way to demonstrate social status. It is very common to sit down at a restaurant^[2] that is full of locals and consistently hear everyone order in English, even if it's obvious from accents that both the wait staff and diners speak Hindi.

I've had the realization that it's a bit like sitting down at a high-end French restaurant in the States and ordering in French. You don't use the language because it is the most effective way to communicate your desired meal, you do it because it signals to the staff and anyone within hearing that you are a learnèd person of culture and means.

The English here is distinct from the English back home

Language is a squishy thing that moves through time and space in unpredictable and surprising ways. English came to the sub-continent a few centuries ago, and from that moment on it has been evolving on its own. Adapting to better suit a different environment. Since I currently operate almost exclusively in English, it's easy to feel like I am understanding and being understood. However, you very quickly find that words and phrases used here do not intrinsically map to those you use at home.

By way of example, the organic food products you buy will make it a point to tell you that they are "untouched by human hands" and you will find yourself wondering about the milk you bought last week that didn't have that disclaimer...

Or you will be enjoying a walk along the coast of the Arabian Sea in the Bandra West neighborhood and suddenly find yourself unsure of what social behavior, exactly, is being discouraged...

Every day that we're here, I find myself realizing that English here is being grown and guided by a different culture and a different set of values. It would be foolish to insist on it mapping exactly to the meanings and signifiers I'm familiar with, but I find myself wondering if there are more pitfalls in communication than I realize. If my confidence at speaking English is nothing more than a false notion that I speak and understand the same language. The medium is the same, but the methods are ontologically distinct.

You can find the comforts of home, but they will not transport you back home

Similar to the above — and in large part because Mumbai is a massive, cosmopolitan place — it is not hard to find things that I miss from home. I've already found a great coffee spot, a place that serves breakfast wraps^[3] with a tangy hot sauce, and an independent English bookstore. All of these have made me feel more at home, more connected to the city. Of course, their similarity to things back home also serves to sharpen the prick of their differences that inevitably occurs with each visit.

The coffee spot is a gentrified house tucked away in a residential neighborhood — neighbors sometimes glare at you when they see you coming. The breakfast spot is setup like fast casual spot where you order at the counter and grab your own seat, but there's valet parking and a security guard who opens the front door for you. When you come in, the wait staff guides you away from the counter, sits you down, and takes your order at the table. You're there for a nice sit down meal, despite appearances.

The bookstore has a lovely selection and is run by a sweet local couple. Despite it's small size and the many signs encouraging you to browse, there is an employee by every shelf who will watch you and and Eagerly make suggestions if they sense an opportunity. The store also has a library upstairs. But here again, English has diverged, it is a private library and patrons pay a monthly fee in order to access its books and use the space.

To be clear, I'm glad to have found these places. They make me feel more at home in this city that I'm going to live in for the next 2 years! But in many ways, if I cling to them too tightly or look to them for a sense of comfort and familiarity, they only serve to highlight that I am far from home rather than make me feel like home is nearby.

Some closing thoughts

I'm thinking that after this post, I'm going to hold off on travel posts until I've had a chance to, well, travel. That's to say, travel outside of the city. I'm still discovering new things about Mumbai & India every day, but a good travel post is usually centered around sharing the unique and novel experiences that come with exploring a new place, rather than a fascination with the minutiae of quotidian life.^[4]

For now, suffice it to say that what once felt strange has begun to feel mundane or commonplace. The beautiful and terrifying thing about living abroad is that it changes you in millions of imperceptible ways. Until one day you look back and realize its hard to recognize who you were or why you held such a narrow set of expectations when you first arrived.

His Master's Voice, p.93
It is not lost on me that this is also an indication I should be seeking out other restaurants. It is entirely plausible that I am only going to those that appeal to my western tendencies and therefore draw a certain type of crowd that expects to use English as a social marker.
This is the closest thing to a breakfast burrito I have found. I did not expect to find it, but I am very glad that I have.
This isn't a rule I expect to keep. Immediately after writing this, I remembered that I have plans to celebrate Diwali next week and that's probably going to be worth a post.

Rules for This Website

2024-10-21T04:04:00.000Z

I've been adhering to some loose mental rules whenever I change or add anything to this website, and I think it's worthwhile to write them down here for posterity. I'll also keep a CHANGELOG section down at the bottom and do my best to keep it up-to-date if and when these rules shift.

DON'T OVERTHINK THE COLOR PALLET.
I think it's really easy to go overboard with colors, and this is a personal cause of many an existential tailspin. So, to avoid falling down this rabbit hole over and over again, I only use black (#000), white (#FFF), and a slightly transparent yellow (rgba(238, 238, 51, 0.6)) on this site.
IF I NEED SOMETHING THAT'S ALREADY ON THE COMPUTER, DON'T BUNDLE IT.
This rule mostly applies to fonts. For my money, this is the most straightforward way to speed up a site. All computers ship with fonts as part of their operating system. Browsers have access to these fonts. So why not use what's already there? With this approach, my site doesn't have to rely on heavy network requests just to show text. Sure, this limits my design, but I've been happy enough with how the site looks when I use Palatino & Courier New. At the end of the day, I set some fallbacks that feel reasonable and I sleep soundly at night.^[1]
VIEWING A PAGE ON A PHONE SHOULD BE SIMILAR TO DESKTOP, BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE IDENTICAL.
A good portion of people viewing my site are probably coming to it via their phone's browser (especially if they click a link I share on social media). I could be a crank and refuse to accommodate them, but media-queries exist and aren't too hard to use, so why not make life a little more enjoyable for everyone?
IF IT CAN'T BE ACHIEVED WITH HTML & SOME CLEVER CSS, IT MIGHT NOT BE WORTH IT.
I have no ill will against JavaScript (unless we start talking about strict equality), and I'll use it if I want my site to do something and it feels like the only way (ref. footnotes). That being said, I think it's easy to overuse JavaScript and slow down a site unnecessarily. As a result, my first attempt is always to stick with HTML + CSS.
THE SITE SHOULD BE AS CLOSE TO FULLY BAKED AS POSSIBLE WHEN A PAGE IS LOADED.
This is complimentary to the above rule about JavaScript. Lots of big, complex apps rely on a design pattern of "send the bare minimum and then fill in the blanks as they arrive." In many cases this makes sense, and is a useful strategy. But this website is not a big, complex app. I use a static site generator (11ty) to turn Markdown files and Nunjucks templates into HTML. If I have a project that includes data I want to show visitors, I want to bake that data into the pages when I build them, not when the browser loads them (ref. maps & dithering).^[2]
LET PEOPLE SEE BEHIND THE CURTAIN.
This one is more philosophical than technical. I'm not trying to make money with this site, and I don't think I'm innovating or doing anything exceptionally unique here. However, I think that the Internet is at its best when ideas are allowed to travel and cross-pollinate. This is only possible if stuff is documented and we explain how the sausage was made. That's why almost every bigger feature on this site has an explanation post (ref. #development), and it's also why every page includes a link to the source code on GitHub. I find that doing this leads to good things. Like pull requests that improve the site's navigation links, or forum comments that give me new ideas for how to optimize site features.

CHANGELOG

2024-10-21 write out the rules for the first time.
2024-12-10 fix list formatting & style

There are plenty of useful lists of operating system fonts to help decide which ones will most likely keep things consistent across platforms.
Note that an exception to this rule is the "currently reading" feature on the site's landing page. However, I am currently working to change this.

Sickness and Martyrdom

2024-10-08T10:18:00.000Z

I've been sick with a wicked sore throat since last week and finally confirmed that it is strep throat. I am extremely bad at being sick, I'm prone to crank up the melodrama and really lean into my martyr complex.^[1]

What better excuse then, to put off my writing for a bit and get lost in a surprisingly apropos book? I've just finished reading Kaveh Akbar's debut novel, Martyr!. Here it is in situ:

It wasn't, by any means, a perfect novel. But it wrestled with big ideas and themes (addiction, death, meaning, the Iranian-American experience, &c.) in a way that resonated. Akbar's poetic use of language was also a pleasure in and of itself. By way of example, here's a sentence he writes to give the reader a sense of place:

"He looked up at the sky, which had begun to clot into blotchy purple clouds."

What a surprising turn of phrase! What refusal to indulge in rote cliché! Every page of the novel is littered with these tiny delights. They made it easy to overlook any quibbles I had with the plot and structure of the story. Ultimately, as with most debuts, the most exciting thing about this book is the flare it sends up about the author's potential. I hope that its success leads to the existence of many more novels written by Kaveh Akbar. I'd look forward to reading them.

I'm not overstating things when I say that it's a wonder my wife does not exile me from our apartment until I'm feeling better. (As you can see, the martyr complex is thriving even now as I write this.)

Auto Generating Dithered Blog Images

2024-10-01T09:00:00.000Z

I've been updating this blog more regularly because of my recent move to India. Previously when I've traveled, I've used 3^rd party platforms to host my travel updates. So, oddly enough, this is the first time I've been "travel blogging" on a site where I control every aspect of the build & publish process.

It's a bit embarrassing that this didn't occur to me sooner, but there were a few things I hadn't considered when I first started posting travel updates. The biggest one: the photos I take with my iPhone are much higher quality than the ones I was taking with a standalone point-and-shoot digital camera 15 years ago. Another more obvious one: 3^rd party platforms like Blogger typically preprocess the images you upload and will resize & compress them however they see fit.

After I published a few travel posts here on my own domain, I quickly realized that my naïve approach of using ImgBot to optimize any pictures I uploaded wasn't going to cut it.^[1] I came up with two potential ways to solve this problem, one boring and one kind of fun. The boring way would have just been to write a quick little script to manually resize & aggressively compress all my recently uploaded images. The fun way, which I ended up doing, and also the reason for this post, was to generate 'dithered twin' images & find a clever way of swapping them out if a user wants to interact and get the full quality image.

Why Dithered Images?

I am well aware that black and white dithering is not a cutting edge compression technique. However, it's been on my mind since I read this great post by Low Tech Magazine a few years ago.^[2] Aside from my primary motivation (i.e. dithering is cool and matches my site's visual aesthetic), it's a great way to generate significantly smaller versions of my posts' images. As an example, on one of my recent travel posts the largest image I added to the post was 2.79MB. The black & white dithered copy that I generated for this is 341.49kb. That's nearly an 88% reduction in size!

That's the "why". The rest of this post is about the "how".^[3]

Dither me this

One beautiful thing about programming and having access to the internet is that if you have an idea about doing something, there's a non-zero probability that someone else has had a similar idea and published their results. I was incredibly lucky to discover that someone had been thinking about dithering images using node.js recently enough and published their library (dither-me-this) via npm. If @DitheringIdiot had not done this, then it would have taken several weeks to get the results I wanted for my images.^[4]

Once I had this library installed, I wrote up a little script and quickly confirmed that I wanted black & white dithering (no additional colors) and that it would work well with the PNG image files I was using.

Design considerations

I didn't want to discard my original images after I had dithered copies. If visitors to the site want full detail, I wanted to give them a way to interact with the image & see it in full quality. However, I also wanted to make sure that the original image was loaded by the time a visitor might interact with it.^[5] As a result, the standard practice of updating the src of the image element, was a non-starter. Also, I prefer not to add JavaScript to this site if I can help it.

Hypertext and sleight of hand

I had a hunch that there was a clever way to do this with just HTML and some CSS, but I was struggling to get it right. I came across this Stack Overflow comment and realized that this was a concise and legible approach that suited my needs. Including both images in the HTML means they are both loaded by the browser when the page is loaded, and I can conceal the slow load times of the larger images by making them invisible until a visitor interacts (hovering on desktop, or tapping on mobile) with the dithered copy I display by default.

Now, since mobile doesn't allow for :hover interaction, I also applied this rule to the :focus interaction for the custom class I wrote. This is a simple way to recreate an on-click interaction for mobile devices without relying on JavaScript.

My final implementation for a dithered blog image looks like this:

HTML

<div class="dithered-hover">
  <img src="img/dithered-image.png" class="blog-pic container" />
  <img src="img/image.png" class="blog-pic container" />
</div>

CSS (source)

div.dithered-hover img.blog-pic:last-child {
    display: none;
}

div.dithered-hover:hover img.blog-pic:last-child,
div.dithered-hover:focus img.blog-pic:last-child {
    display: block;
}

div.dithered-hover:hover img.blog-pic:first-child,
div.dithered-hover:focus img.blog-pic:first-child {
    display: none;
}

The CSS looks more complicated because I wanted to make absolutely sure that I am only applying this affect to images are using the classes I expect. But the reality is, I'm just toggling the visibility of two images within a <div> based on whether they are the first or last child element of that <div>.

The only downside to this approach is that it if you use reading mode, it strips out my CSS and you'll just see two images stacked on top of one another:

At the end of the day, I decided I could live with reader mode being a little broken.

Easy living with shortcodes

With any technical updates to this site, I'm forced to ask myself if it's worth putting in the time to make it as easy as possible to use or if I can be happy with a manual process. With this project, I decided from the outset that it should be very straightforward to include dithered images in a blog post. I also knew that I didn't want to do it completely by default so that I still had the option to include non-dithered photos if I felt like it.

Since I've learned about shortcodes and how my static generator supports them (ref. How I Added Maps to my Travel Posts), I knew pretty early on that I didn't want to have to copy and paste boilerplate HTML between my posts' files.

I started out by deciding I my shortcode would be this simple:

{% dither "/relative/path/to/image.png" %}

From this starting point I built out an async shortcode that takes an image path string & returns the expected block of HTML.^[6]

First attempt: generating the images at build time

My initial thought was that the best way to do this would be to generate the dithered copy at build time. I did this pretty naively within my shortcode (you can see this attempt here), but quickly found that this caused my site's build time to become unacceptably slow. Instead of taking ~3 seconds to build the whole site it started taking ~30 seconds, and I was only generating dithered copies for a handful of images. If I kept going down this path, my build time would increase with every dithered image I added to my blog. This would be unsustainable.

At this point, I got a bit frustrated. Would I not be able to set this up to happen automatically? Would I need to remember to run a script manually any time I added new images to a blog post?

Second attempt: reducing manual toil with automation

As I was reworking my dithering code to be a standalone script that I could run on my local machine, I remembered a very insightful blog post from a former colleague where she mentions using a GitHub action to push a commit to a specific branch.^[7] It was a short trip from this realization to writing a script that checked for any images without a dithered twin & generated one if necessary. Now, for every commit I push up to my site's repo, this script runs. If it finds a non-dithered image, it will generate one, commit it, and push it to the branch I'm working on.

Here's an abbreviated version of my workflow's job definition (full source here):

dither:
  runs-on: ubuntu-latest
  steps:
    ...
    - name: Generate dithered copies
      run: npm run dither
    - name: Check for changes
      id: check_changes
      run: |
        if [[ -n $(git status --porcelain) ]]; then
          echo "changes=true" >> "$GITHUB_OUTPUT";
        fi
    - name: Commit results
      if: steps.check_changes.outputs.changes == 'true'
      run: |
        git config --local user.email "action@github.com"
        git config --local user.name "GitHub Action"
        git add -A && git commit -m "👾 dithered images"
        git push origin ${{ github.ref_name }}

In plain language, the job will setup and run my dithering script. If the script generated any new images, these will be detected and committed to the branch that triggered the check.

Of course, I also gave myself options. If I'm doing local development and want to check how something looks, I can still generate a dithered twin easily using the npm run dither. Because I've written the script to check if a dithered copy exists before doing anything, if I decide to push up the generated image it won't cause me any headaches.

Guardrails & strategy going forward

Over the course of putting this in place, I made sure to put in some guardrails to make sure I'm using this as expected. The first are simple ones: have 11ty throw an error if I try to use my dither shortcode for any files that are not PNGs, don't let 11ty build successfully if I've used my dither shortcode without generating the corresponding twin image, don't dither an already dither image, &c.

I've also realized just how big the images I was adding from my iPhone were, so I've added a small manual step of reducing the size of the .heic files when I convert them to .png on my machine. I didn't think to do this originally and that's part of why the files I've added to my previous travel posts are so large. I'm leaving those in place, but going forward my goal is to keep any new images to below 1MB per image to keep things snappy.

Thanks for reading to the end! As a small token of appreciation, here's my dog Myron watching me work on this project:

Worth mentioning that I probably would not have noticed this if I was not loading up my site on slower internet speed than I used to have in the states. Which is just a nice reminder that, if you're building something for a global audience, you should see how it does on slower internet.
Revisiting this Low Tech Magazine article now, I can see that it's served as a bit of a touchstone for my design philosophy with this site over the years.
If you're interested in a less polished account of how I did this, you can also see my process directly by reading the issue I used to track this and the pull request where I implemented my solution.
And, if I'm being completely honest, I likely would have put this project on the backburner and not come around to it for several more months.
A very talented engineer I used to work with once gave a talk about "perceived performance" and I still reference it to this day. It's a very good talk.
I'm simplifying here a bit. I also added a check to make sure I don't accidentally use the shortcode with files that are not PNGs. This shortcode went through several iterations before landing on its final iteration.
The excellent Katy Decorah's How I built a now reading feature.

In Situ Books

2024-09-25T13:05:00.000Z

The web app I've been using to track my reading — Oku — hasn't solved the problem of book covers for a given edition. Especially if it's an older edition or a less popular book (read: from an Indie Press). I don't hold this against Oku. They are a small team doing this on the side. And they probably don't have the funds or desire to pay a 3^rd party for access to a database of cover images.^[1]

But as a result, when I pull up the list of books I've read recently on the app, I see a bunch of bland, gray squares where the covers should be. I didn't think this bothered me, but this year, I have found myself taking pictures of the books I'm reading as I'm reading them. Here's one I finished recently:

Chuck has a weakness for the melodramatic, but then again so do I.

There's something oddly comforting about this practice of personal record keeping. Rather than rely on someone else to provide an "official" cover image for a book, I have a record of the exact cover in the exact state it was when I read it. Even better, these photos include visual reminders about where I was doing the reading. Here's one I read earlier this year before moving abroad. It immediately reminds me of sitting in my old apartment's living room in the Spring:

Meghan O'Gieblyn's latest memoir / essay collection is worth checking out, if you haven't already.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with these pictures. Maybe I'll compile them and build my own personal database of books in situ. Maybe I'll just keep them on my phone, and stumble across them from time to time. Each one tied to the memory of a place & a feeling.

Though each blank square brings me closer & closer to just building my own bookshelf.

Mumbai at Street Level

2024-09-20T12:30:00.000Z

Prior to coming to Mumbai, I happened to read James C. Scott's Seeing like a State. As a result, I can't help but looking at Mumbai through the lens of his chapters on the difference between top-down planning that makes a place more legible and quantifiable to outsiders versus the pragmatic, organic development of a city actively built to suit the needs of its residents. Paradoxically, it feels like Mumbai disproves his arguments in some ways and proves them in others. I've discussed aspects of this in a previous post, so I won't retread the same ground here. Needless to say, though, it's still on my mind.

Rather than unpack whether or not a niche anthropological book published back in the 90s is relevant to the city I currently live in, I wanted to take a moment to share some more impressions now that we've been here for more than a month. Readers familiar with Scott's work, please feel free to connect these observations to Scott's thesis at your leisure.

Staccato movement

Living in Washington, DC for the past decade spoiled me as a pedestrian and a bicyclist. For the few years that I worked a fully remote job, whenever I felt cooped up I would often just grab my keys and wallet, pick a destination that I knew had free WiFi, and walk out my front door. This lifestyle simply doesn't exist in the same recognizable form here in Mumbai. There are sidewalks in my neighborhood, but they are not guaranteed or consistent throughout the city. In most places, the expectation is that both pedestrians and motorists will be aware of one another while occupying the same street. Green space is by and large considered a private concern, so you depend on your apartment complex to fill that need and should not expect it to be met while you are out in public. I've started to improve my comfort with this arrangement, but I've had to accept that the pleasure of a meandering walk around my neighborhood is one I'll have to forego while I'm here. Mumbai is not made for les flâneurs. Any pedestrian must be vigilant at all times, and not allow his mind to wander too far, lest inattentiveness lead to calamity.

India certainly seems to have a love affair with motored vehicles. Auto-rickshaws and Suzuki cabs are on every street and at every turn. They roam as freely as a crowd of people at an open air music festival and negotiate space in much the same way. They speak to one another in their own unique language of horns and gestures. It is anarchy in the affectionate sense of the word. No rules imposed from on high. Everything up for negotiation. Each moment open to creativity and the possibility of invention, regardless of what has happened before or what will happen after.^[1] No two drives between fixed points are ever the same.

The effect of all this, however, is that I rarely feel any sense of stillness or ease when I am between my point of departure and my point of arrival. The space in between is always frenetic and surprising.

Out and about in high (touch) society

There are other aspects of being out in public that challenge my personal sensibilities. These are subjective in all the usual ways: cultural, personal, and historical.

There's the obvious discomfort of being a visible minority everywhere I go. I've experienced this before living in Morocco, and while visiting Africa and other parts of Asia. I'm forced to admit that it has felt the most acute in India. I suspect this is in part due to the sheer density of Mumbai as a city. Washington, DC has an estimated population density of 11,280 residents per square mile, whereas Mumbai's density is estimated to be closer to 53,000 residents per square mile.^[2] Every time I step outside, I'm likely to cross paths with at least 5 times as many human beings as I'm used to. Since there aren't very many other residents with dirty blonde hair and blue eyes walking around, sweating through their t-shirts, that's usually about 5 times as many eyes locked on to me.^[3]

Additionally, as an American, when I walk into a shop of any kind, I've discovered that I'm bringing with me a whole set of cultural assumptions about how the interaction will proceed. Almost all of these assumptions are contradicted in India. I've taken to naming the phenomenon "high touch" customer service. The gist of it being, every interaction and transaction will be bring you into frequent and insistent contact with multiple people. Browsing at stores is possible, but any store you are in will have employees dedicated to standing by specific shelves to watch you shop, make suggestions, or answer any questions you have. You never have to swivel your head and look for a store employee, there is always one right at your elbow. You get the impression that every discrete function of a shop has been atomized and assigned to an employee. If you want fruit or vegetables, you select them, but you do not bag or weigh them yourself. You bring them to the scale at the end of the aisle where two employees are standing at the ready. They will weigh and label your items for you. If you want to buy mustard and reach for the imported one your familiar with, someone will materialize in short order to point out that the domestic brand is similar in quality and quite a bit cheaper. Any transaction you undertake will require you to interact with at least 3 to 4 people at a minimum.^[4]

As a result, you may be tempted to forego stepping outside and instead take advantage of the popular and dependable throng of delivery & on-demand service apps. It's incredibly easy, without proactively making plans, to never leave your apartment and have everything arrive at your doorstep within an hour of you deciding you need it. If, however, there are any hiccups with or uncertainties about the transaction, the "high touch" cultural reflex kicks in and you will need to respond to calls and WhatsApp messages from every part of the supply chain (restaurant, delivery, front desk, &c.). All them working hard to make sure the thing arrives to you as you intend.

DC as phantom limb

All this to say, I'm feeling a bit homesick this week. I've appreciated the time to sit inside and focus on my writing, but when the urge to break up my daily routine comes — when I feel the craving to just go outside and experience the city — I've found that the itch is never quite scratched to my satisfaction.

I know that these feelings ebb and flow, and I'm not going to wallow in them too much. I'm cataloging them here primarily to log my own process of learning about and adapting to a new city. Of course, I hope it goes without saying that the above represents my very contingent experience of this city at this point in time, and I hope it doesn't come across as disingenuous or dismissive of my host country.

again I find myself returning to the idea of improvisation as the guiding spirit of the city
My sources for these numbers are Wikipedia: Washington, DC & Wikipedia: Mumbai. It's worth mentioning that while I'm using the Wikipedia numbers here because it's a source I'm inclined to trust, there are other sites referencing other data sources that put Mumbai's density even higher at approximately 77,000/sq mile.
It's also common for obvious outsiders (read: pasty white tourists like myself) to be asked for selfies by complete strangers. I've experienced this once so far. Even when done in good faith it can feel like a gross invasion of your personal space and privacy.
This rule does not hold for smaller shops, where you will be in a confined space and only need to talk to 1 to 2 people, not counting the helpful employee who saw you coming and opened the door for you on your way in.

How I Added Maps to my Travel Posts

2024-09-12T12:30:00.000Z

Travel posts on my blog now have maps at the top. With any big(ger) change to this website, I like to take a minute to walk through why I did it, and how it came together. I enjoy doing this a) because it's a nice memento of how I approached and solved a problem I set for myself, and b) I hate to horde knowledge and on the off chance someone wants to add svg maps to their personal website, maybe this will help them navigate the process.

Why the Maps?

Two main reasons, both of them more personal and emotional than logical. First, I like maps and I miss working with them! All of the best jobs I've had in my adult life revolved around working with maps on a regular basis. As a research assistant in grad school, I was lucky to work for an old school Geography Professor who would have me plot historical data on maps by hand. As a Software Engineer, I managed to end up working on a small corner of the Mapbox platform for a few years. Long workdays are much more enjoyable when you are working on something that you find visually engaging.

The second reason is nostalgia. The very first blog I ever updated regularly^[1] was the travel blog I started as a foreign exchange student to France^[2]. I distinctly remember the feature, which seems to have been buried or de-emphasized in the current user interface, of being able to enter a location and have my blog include a link and a map. Even when I migrated to Blogger for a college study abroad, there was an option to enter a location that would auto-generate links to Google maps. To my mind, this is a key feature for a blog if it's going to include updates from different parts of the world.

My Requirements

The first thing I did when I finally accepted that this was something that I wanted to add to my blog was to sit down and sketch out requirements. Not to sound like too much of a corporate programmer, but this is a really useful exercise. Without it, anything in the world is possible, and I will spend all of my time imagining and researching different ways to solve the problem.

It doesn't have to be an exhausted list of how to do the thing. Just a simple set of rules that I'm going to try to use to guide me through the process. Here are the three main requirements I initially sketched out:

No 3^rd party platforms
Generated at build time
Looks consistent on mobile & desktop

I had other unarticulated requirements like map style, projection, &c. But I didn't think about these too hard at the outset, and opted to feel my way through them during implementation instead. These core three are worth discussing in greater detail.

I. The map should not depend on a 3^rd party platform.

This may sound hypocritical, since I used to work for a mapping company. In fact, the easiest way to implement this feature would have been make API calls to the Mapbox product I used to work on (the Static Images API). Even though I know with certainty that those maps would be well cached and load effectively, I didn't want this feature to be tied to a 3rd party that could: raise prices, deprecate the product, change the API, or degrade for any reason outside of my own control.

II. The map should be generated at build time, not runtime

This one gets back to performance. It's easy to throw a bunch of javascript at the problem and have the page reach out and fetch any data or assets I need when the page loads. However, this causes problems if any of those resources become unavailable (similar to the motivation for my first requirement) or a visitor to my page has slow internet. If all of the data necessary to display the map is baked right into the page, in a format that all browsers support, this feature will work consistently well for everyone that visits the page.

III. The map should be consistent across desktop & mobile

This is maybe my loosest core requirement. I love the idea of media queries and I use them strategically in my site's CSS. In an ideal world, visitors can enjoy my blog regardless of what device they're using when they stumble across it. That being said, I get existential when I start to think too hard about the potential variation in screen size depending on device. My main requirement here was simply that the maps shouldn't look beautiful on desktop but then be broken when loaded up on a phone.

If you haven't seen any of my posts that include these maps, here is a quick screenshot of the final result:

Now, let me walk you through how I made it to this point.

Implementation Details

With these core three criteria in the back of my head, I started digging away. As you can see from the description I made when I created a github issue in early July of this year, I had a feeling that a key part of the solution would be to leverage 11ty's^[3] built in support of "shortcodes" so that I can conditionally add maps the templating files of my post.njk template file.

One of the reasons I used 11ty way back in the day, and the main reason I have stuck with the tool this long, is because it's so easy to just start doing stuff, and do it quickly. It only took me a few minutes to confirm that shortcodes worked as expected with my current templating language (nunjucks).

I added this line to my .eleventy.js file to create a new shortcode:

eleventyConfig.addShortcode("cartographer", (location) => {})

Then updated my post.njk file to call this shortcode above the main content of any pages it processes. In nunjucks this looks like:

{% cartographer location %}

Note that the way I've defined my shortcode, it expects one variable as an argument, location. This is defined in in the front matter of my posts *.md files and corresponds to the location key I've defined in my cities.json - which I'll discuss further down.

Once I was confident that my templating setup would work as expected it was time to decide on my mapping library, get some map data, and start making some maps.

Generating Maps as SVGs

Editor's Note: I owe a great deal to this blog post about using d3 to map geographic data. While I'm familiar with d3, I had a great deal of trouble finding my way through their docs when I began this project. This blog post was a great 'lodestar' in terms of identifying how d3's API was structured and what terms I needed to use to properly search the docs.

All three of my requirements made me immediately think that the best way to tackle this problem would be through generating SVGs. This meant I needed two things:

a javascript library that can turn map data into SVG paths
some free map data with global coverage

For the first point, I immediately thought of d3-geo. This tool has been around for ever, it supports styling & re-projecting geospatial data, and the broader d3 ecosystem is the the gold standard for web visualization. Best of all, and I didn't know this for sure until I looked into it, it has built in methods that will turn GeoJSON data into SVG paths.^[4]

For drawing the map, I knew needed that I would be manually defining my own POIs, but I also knew that I would need some country shape files for my base map. Otherwise, the map would be meaningless. I reached for Natural Earth, then remembered^[5] they don't provide any of their data as GeoJSON. After a brief google, I found what I needed to make my map legible here.^[6]

Finally, before I could pull everything together, I needed to define location data so that my shortcode could generate maps based on a predefined set of locations. This part took some iterating to get to the point where I liked it.

My first implementation just included raw lat/lon tags in my page front matter, but I quickly discarded this as I didn't want to have to copy/paste the same values each time I wrote a new blog in a location I had already defined. I also wanted my little image at the front to include a message to help explain why the map was there, and simply having "lat: xx.xx, lon: yy.yy" as a caption just didn't feel as satisfying.

So I added a cities key into my metadata.json file. At first, the value was an object that simply had the lat/lon values so that I could define them once and reference them anywhere in my page front matter. I quickly realized that I could also include a display_name value & url link to the location's Wikipedia page. However, once I had all of that in one place, I quickly realized that it made more sense to keep all of this as a standalone data file, so I moved everything to cities.json.

Pulling all of these together, here is what my final implementation of the shortcode looks like in its entirety:^[7]

eleventyConfig.addShortcode("cartographer", (location) => {
  if (!cities[location]) return "";
  const { lat, lon, display_name, url } = cities[location];

  const graticule = d3.geoGraticule10();
  const projection = d3
    .geoEqualEarth()
    .scale(600)
    .center([lon, lat])
    .translate([344, 168.56]);
  const path = d3.geoPath(projection);

  const mapSvg = `<svg width="688" height="337.12" viewBox="0 0 688 337.12">
    <g>
      <path d="${path(graticule)}" stroke="#000" fill="none"></path>
      <path d="${path(worldData)}" stroke="#fff" fill="#ccc"></path>
      <circle cx="344" cy="168.56" r="5" stroke-width="2px" stroke="#000" fill="rgba(238, 238, 51, 0.6)" />
      <circle cx="344" cy="168.56" r="15" stroke-width="2px" stroke="#000" stroke-dasharray="5,5" fill="transparent" />
    </g>
  </svg>`;

  return `
  <div align=center><b>a dispatch from:</b> <a href="${url}">${display_name}</a></div>
   ${mapSvg}
  <br />
   `;
});

Now, I didn't expect to hard code some literal SVG & HTML stuff this way, but it helped me during the styling phase to have control over each layered element of the SVG and I didn't spend enough time with d3-geo to figure out if there was a better way to do things and achieve the same outcome. All things said & done, it feels clean enough for now, and I have a decent amount of confidence that I'll be able to grok it if I ever return to it for tweaks.

Styling & Sizing the SVG

As you'll note in the code block above, I styled the SVG elements explicitly and directly in my shortcode definition. I initially toyed with using d3-geo's built in circle method to generate a GeoJSON feature and mark the map that way. However, because I was using the Equal Earth projection, the marker would look distorted in different ways depending on where it was on the map. Because I'm centering the map on my point of interest anyway, I quickly realized it was easier to add the SVG primitive element circle as a layer and place it in the middle. This produced the visual

For sizing, it took a little bit of fiddling to make sure that my SVGs are not too big (read: wide) on a desktop, but not too small on a mobile browser. I ended up using a solution I had used other elements:

/* For devices larger than a phablet */
@media (min-width: 550px) {
    svg {
        width: 75%;
    }
}

/* For devices smaller than a phablet */
@media (max-width: 550px) {
    svg {
        width: 100%;
    }
}

Et voilà:

desktop	mobile

Future Tinkering

With any project, I could have probably tinkered with this forever.^[8] But it's time to move on. Here's what I might focus on if I ever decide to revisit this:

More & higher precision geographical data (bodies of water? roads? railways?) and zoom the map in more
Add an overview map the shows all the locations that I've included in my posts, and make this visible on the #travel filter page.
Add a little bit of interactivity? I didn't want to when I first thought of this feature, but maybe that will change.

In any case, tech blogs can be painfully long sometimes, this one certainly is, but thank you for making it to the end!

Worth noting, I exported the majority of posts from this blog back in 2018 when I first bought the domain and set up this personal website. If you're interested in some, admittedly very amateur, travel writing from a younger version of me you can find browse them under the #archive tag -- more specifically they're the archived ones tagged #france
By some miracle, the platform travelblog.org still exists. It's been changed significantly since I used it all those years ago and you're more likely to get a 504 response as you click around, but wow - someone is still paying for that domain and keeping all of those old, half-baked posts up and available. Even more inspiring, new posts are still popping up from a diverse group of posters from all over the world! Isn't the internet a wild and beautiful?
11ty is the static site generator tool I have used to build my website for ages. It's simple and fast, and I've never regretted adopting it. I talk a little bit about the decision to start using it over in Re:Design.
What's more, if I ever decide to ditch my first two requirements, it wouldn't be hard to repurpose my current setup and use the other parts of the library that allow you to make interactive map elements.
For the record, I always make this mistake when I'm pulling basic data like this. Natural Earth has lots of good geographic data, so it will always be my first thought when I need some for free, but it provides all of it as shapefiles so I either do my own conversion or (more likely) to find the repo on GitHub where someone else has already done the work for me.
A big thank you to @martynaffor for doing the work to convert all of these data files to GeoJSON and then sharing them publicly for people like me to find.
Writing it out like this, I'm worried I made it sound like I knew what I was doing the whole time. I want to emphasize, emphatically, that this was not the case. I especially stumbled over the d3 API and wasted a significant amount of time figuring out how to get my sizing & offsets right.
Heck, I even changed some things while writing this post.

Odd Neighbors

2024-09-10T10:44:00.000Z

Our first night in Mumbai, I was surprised to find massive snails scooting around on the pavement outside our apartment. No one had warned me. It wasn't mentioned in any of the blogs, travel shows, or Wikipedia articles I had seen before we came over.

Imagine my surprise. I mean, look at this thing:

A giant garden snail, just out there doing its thing.

Maybe that picture doesn't drive home the point? Here's one with my hand nearby for scale:

Let the record show there is no forced perspective at play here.

This isn't even the biggest one I've seen! It's just the biggest one I've seen during daylight when I had my phone nearby.

I did the least possible amount of research, and this is likely the invasive species^[1] Lissachatina fulica, or the Giant African land snail. I'm not super confident in my ability to classify gastropods, though, so take all of this with a grain of salt.

After being here in Mumbai for a few weeks, I've realized that it's starting to feel normal just to see these big snails scooting around near my feet when I'm outside and it's a bit wet. Therefore, this post serves two purposes:

Get the word out. More people should know that these alien creatures roam the streets of Mumbai during the Monsoon.
Make a personal note about how strange and new it felt to see them for the first time. Seriously, it was something out of a King Kong or Jurassic Park movie^[2].

Update September 12, 2024: I wasn't too happy with the size comparison photo I took the earlier this week. This morning conditions were wetter and some beefier boys were hanging around the dog area in my apartment complex. Please admit this additional photographic evidence to the official record:

As you can see, this chonker's about as long as my fist.

A little bit like me! (Except they got here +150 years ago.)
The stakes were much lower, I'll grant.

The Improvised City

2024-08-26T15:54:00.000Z

I've been dragging my feet on writing about my new city for a little bit. I wanted to take some time to make sure I had seen more of it than just the small corner our apartment complex is located in. I also needed the time to take stock of my own feelings about traveling at this moment in my life, or even honestly this moment in time.

Before I share impressions of Mumbai, I want to mention two big things that have struck me as significant compared to my previous experience with living abroad^[1].

First and most impactful, the ubiquity of smart phones has made living abroad incredibly easy. It's a bit astounding that this has been a change I can feel so acutely in my own lifetime. When I was an exchange student in France, the iPhone had only just been released in the U.S. and only wealthy nerds had one. Internet on phones existed, but it was something you accidentally opened on your flip phone and then freaked out because of the outsized impact it would have on your monthly bill. This has completely changed in the past decade and a half. I now travel with a smart phone that is on an international data plan. If I need a ride somewhere in the city, I can pull up an app and have a car that knows my destination pull up in minutes. If I'm not sure about what something is called when I'm at a store, I can pause and look it up on my phone so that I have a better chance of having a successful interaction with a shop keeper who speaks limited English. I can't stress enough how significantly this has shaped the experience of navigating the context of a foreign country.^[2]

Second, my past experiences have made me much more comfortable with discomfort. Living outside of your own country is always uncomfortable. This is inevitable. When you step outside of the context of your own culture, you are immediately confronted by the assumptions you make about daily life because these assumptions are not standardized across cultures. No matter how experienced of a traveler you are, this will always be true. However, my life to this point has been filled with experiences beyond the border of my own cultural sense of comfort. I had the opportunity to be an exchange student right after high school, I studied abroad in college thanks to a language scholarship, hell - I had a Midwestern upbringing and I lived in DC for the last 10 years. These experiences are compounding in one sense. The more familiar the feeling of discomfort, of not being entirely sure what the expectations or norms are for a given social situation, the more adept you become at navigating them. An imperfect metaphor that comes to mind is that it's a bit like learning to ride a motorcycle. The moment you learn to work with the machine, rather than fight against it, is the moment the experience becomes enjoyable rather than terrifying. Each successive ride adds confidence. Confidence allows you to feel the thrill of the experience rather than cringe at it. At least in my experience.

The Feeling of Being in the City

With those long winded caveats out of the way, what do I think of this new city? This has been the hardest thing to put my finger on. India itself is very different from anywhere else I've traveled. That being said, Mumbai feels very different. For starters, it is a sprawling city of ~24 million residents. The largest city I lived in prior to this point was Chicago, with its ~4 million people. But there's more to it than that, urbanization in India - the shift from mostly rural populations to highly concentrated urban populations - also appears to be happening^[3] at a much more rapid clip than any other city I've lived in.

What do you do when the population of a city explodes faster than infrastructure projects can keep up? You improvise. This, to me, seems to be the central feature of the character of Mumbai. The people keep coming, and the local government is frantically trying to keep up. But this is an impossible task, and so in the gap between government structure and demand, what is there? There are the localized improvisations of the residents. By the time infrastructure projects eventually catch up, the improvisations are so thoroughly established and depended on by the community, that any improvement project must account for them and incorporate them. As a result, to be anywhere in Mumbai is to feel the presence of these innumerable improvisations. Either as the fluid, novel solutions to a pressing need or as a past solution that has solidified and become a cornerstone in daily life.

This is my anecdotal feeling of Mumbai after being here for only a few weeks. I am confident it will shift and change as I become more familiar with my home over the next two years. I don't pretend that my first impressions are always the most correct, but it will be interesting to look back on this post and see if this feeling has persisted.

An impression that I can share more confidently: India absolutely spoils you culinarily. I don't think I have any food that wasn't completely delicious. Even something as simple as a cup of fresh sugar cane juice for ₹15 from a stand. Much better than I expected, and when I asked it was because they add ginger and lemon as they serve it. There is a special attention to the details with any food you find. Currently my biggest problem is remembering the names of the dishes I've eaten so that I can re-order them.

Sights: Seen

This past weekend, Karolina and I decided to do our due diligence and book a guided tour of the city we've moved to. Here are a few of the sites we saw^[4]:

bird's eye view of dhobi ghat, an open air laundry

the Gateway of India

the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, sometimes just called "The Taj"

a string of boats moored just off the coast near the Gateway of India

a plaque commemorating the historic residence of mahatma gandhi

Gandhi's preserved living quarters

a famous place to grab vada pav near Mumbai's train station, included here primarily for my own future reference

the inside of a section of Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Mandai, previously known as "Crawford Market"

If you're curious about these previous experiences, you can browse the #france or #morocco blog tags here on my site.
There is also, of course, a part of me that feels mournful about the loss of "friction" when living abroad. Yes, it was harder to accomplish simple tasks at first. But the deepened cultural knowledge and personal satisfaction that follow overcoming these frictions - after significant trial and error - are/were one of the most enriching parts of traveling abroad. However, this is a subject for a different post.
or have happened? it is both something that has occurred and is constantly occurring, I suppose.
We're still in the middle of the Monsoon, so it was a pretty gray day. I am also forced to admit that my photography skills are middling at best.

Ras Malai

2024-08-26T15:54:00.000Z

I've been in India for a little over a week. I still know and understand very little, but I'm starting to get a better sense of things — at least things in my small corner of Mumbai.

On reflection, the most important discovery of this past week was ras malai, which was given to me as a snack during a journey to Navi Mumbai to finalize my dog Myron's paperwork with the Indian government. The paperwork was uneventful, the ras malai on an empty stomach after a long afternoon was revelatory.

It's like a creamy, custard-y cheese cake without a crust. Might have been my empty stomach, or the fact that it was totally unexpected, but sipping the cardamom milk and biting into the spongy cheese dumplings filled me with a culinary joy that one rarely feels after turning 30.

The best part is, I'm not even sure if the one I had was very good. My pet expediter bought it from a roadside shop. I sipped the lukewarm milk out of a plastic takeaway container that had been taped shut for easier transportation.

Loved every part of it. 10 out of 10 points, can't wait to have it again.

VS Code Obsolescence

2024-08-20T14:44:00.000Z

For the first time in a while, my development machine is not one provided by my work. Because I'm taking a break from the world of software engineering all the work I'm doing^[1] is happening on the 2015 MacBook Pro I had leftover from a previous job^[2].

Now, maybe this is a naive proposition, but I think that a 9 year old laptop with 250 GB of memory, a 2.9 GHz dual-core processor, and 8 GB of RAM should still hum along quite well^[3] for basic tasks. Yet, lo and behold, as I was working on some tweaks to my site I was dismayed to learn that this wasn't the case. With only my web browser open & VS Code running, my laptop slowed to a crawl. Taking a peak at Activity Monitor, VS Code & it's associated processes were gobbling up all of my CPU. I was stunned. Naysayers might cry foul and say it was probably some renegade plugin. But this was a fresh install, I hadn't added any 3rd party plugins.

So I've been forced to give VS Code the boot and look around with bleary eyes at the alternatives. My main criteria were that it should preferably be something that doesn't rely on Electron and that has a file tree I can easily toggle on and off^[4]. After some brief and frustrating time spent (mis)configuring NeoVIM^[5], I am now just tweaking my website using TextMate^[6]. I would have loved to try out CodeEdit, but alas they are not supporting MacOS versions <13.x, so here we are.

Writing out this quick blog post included.
I did not steal this laptop. In ancient times, when I worked as a data analytics consultant, my company had a subsidized B.Y.O.-Laptop policy where they would cut you a check for a couple hundred bucks and you could decide what laptop you wanted to have instead of just being handed a standard issue one. Of course, as a consultant, I usually had a client-provided laptop for security reasons, so this PC has been mostly a personal device since I first acquired it nearly a decade ago.
Even if my OS is relegated to only security updates and I'll never see the lush, verdant digital fields of whatever patch of California Apple decides to name the next iteration of MacOS after.
Having a project file tree adjacent to my currently working file is a mental salve, and not having the option to quickly toggle it out of the box makes me feel like Loki under his fateful venom drip.
Honestly, I've started and stopped several times with using NeoVIM and the biggest hurdle for me isn't learning the abstruse commands or interface, it's being able to properly install and manage plugins without a bunch of yak shaving. If NeoVIM shipped with a project file tree out of the box, then that's probably what I'd be using now.
For those keeping score at home, the highest I've seen TextMate's CPU % in my Activity Monitor — even while actively editing documents — is ~5%. When I'm not actively typing, it's using less CPU than Activity Monitor itself!

Your Man in Mumbai

2024-08-19T13:05:00.000Z

sic transit iter

We arrived in Mumbai shortly after Indian Independence Day. Finally making it through customs at around 2 AM this past Friday. Well over 24 hours of total travel time, my estimate based on a rudimentary understanding of time zones is that all total we were in transit for a total of 29 hours. We did this with a 15 month old, an in-cabin pet, and 8 suitcases. Not to mention my backpack, a car seat, and a stroller.

In the moment, this was incredibly stressful. With hindsight of a few days, I can say I think this was the most stressful trip I have ever taken in my life. And we were lucky, both our son and our dog are good travelers, we made it through without any major meltdowns or accidents.

impressions

Due to the aforementioned son and dog, this trip is very much different from any that I have taken in the past. Traveling abroad for an extended period of time is not completely novel to me^[1], but traveling with all of my responsibilities in tow certainly is. Especially as a parent, I am finding that it's necessary to temper my usual adventurous approach to exploring a new city with the consideration of what's best and least traumatizing for a toddler. For example, I am not about to brave Mumbai traffic as a pedestrian (an art unto itself!) with a 15-month old on my hip.

The city is massive. I haven't been able to get a good look at it, but it feels endless. Like a great plain, but rather than grass it's covered in a seething mass of people and concrete. Always moving. Honking. Incessantly humming its own distinct atonal song.

Other things we are having to navigate and decipher. The apartment building and all its unique rhythms. One of the first challenges we faced after our first day here was: what do we do with the garbage? We were at a total loss as there are no trash chutes or any of the typical things we would expect based on our years of apartment living in the U.S. I had to ask the security guard posted at our front door. A very serious man, who nevertheless flashes a knowing smile any time I walk up to him, because he knows I'm about to ask him something silly or naive. Turns out that I'm just supposed to leave our garbage bags in front of our door and every day around 10 or 11 the building staff will swing by and pick it up. I never would have guessed.

On the nature of the trash itself, guidelines are that we're supposed to separate "wet" trash from "dry" trash. We have yet to get a clear definition of either. When we asked some folks from the consulate who have already been here for nearly a year, they confessed that they are still unclear on which is which. Either way, I have different colored trash bags I'm supposed to use and I have a creeping paranoia that the building staff are going to confront me about their misuse in the near future. But that's okay, there's time to learn.

Many other things have happened in the few short days we've been here. I won't bore you with an itemized list. Suffice it so say, this is a challenge and we're going to spend a lot of time being silly and making mistakes. Oh, one thing I will mention, though, is that the takeout food — which we've had to eat quite a bit of while we figure out groceries and things — is exceptionally good so far.

summatim

Here we are at the beginning of quite a long journey. I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that we will be here in this gargantuan city for two years. That's twice as long as my son has been alive. Some of his first memories are probably going to be this city, culture, and people. That's both an exciting and a terrifying prospect. Partly because I have no idea what this will entail. Partly because its so far afield from my own childhood experience.

Regardless, I am glad for the adventure. There are very few opportunities to step outside the humdrum cycles of life you find yourself in as an adult. Even challenging ones like this broaden the scope of my life and nourish my spirit.

More to come on this front, I'm sure.

refer to any of these previous posts: a, b, c, d

This World is Ending

2024-07-16T16:18:00.000Z

I'm going to ask you to be hopeful about the end of the world. It may seem counter intuitive, but there is optimism in this.

Accept that this world is ending. This world you've known and grown up in cannot continue. All the good. All the bad. None of it will last the decade. It will soon be something you only access in memories. Sit with this a moment. Inevitably there is fear. Inevitably the unknown causes your pupils to dilate. The hair to prick up on the back of your neck. How could this not be the case? It's the only world you've known. It's been changing since the day you were born, but it's always felt solid. Tangible. But we all have to agree and look at with clear eyes. When you try to hold it in your hands, it crumbles and slips through your fingers.

Now see the opportunity. Yes, this world you've known is dying. What seeds will you plant that might sprout from its decay? What future might we cultivate in the wide open fields where it once it loomed so large above our heads?

Doom can be seductive. Apathy brings its own sense of comfort. But I believe, earnestly, if we're going to get through this current moment, we need to think about the world we wish to birth after the old has collapsed under its own weight.

This doesn't mean it will be easy. This doesn't mean there won't be countervailing forces, jackboots, or grief. There are others who wish to see new, crueler worlds, after all. But the moment we accept our loss rather than cling to vain hope — that is the moment the cultivation of the next world can begin.

Walk with Me

2024-06-20T15:02:00.000Z

I'm starting to feel nostalgic about the routines in my life, which is weird. Maybe because I know that the shape of my daily life is about to change. There's one routine in particular I'm going to miss. I'm fortunate to live within walking distance to my son's daycare. Every morning I grab his stroller and walk him through the Capitol Hill neighborhood of DC for about 15 minutes before dropping him off.

I wanted to capture the impression of this quiet morning walk. It's not really possible unless you're there and sensitive to the moment. Everything else is just a crude reproduction. Nonetheless, I recorded a 5(ish) minute chunk of it this week, and I'm sharing it here. It's a meditative track. The constant rumble of the stroller's wheels on the brick sidewalk. The ructions of vehicle engines as they speed by or slow down for speed bumps. A random snatch of words as I walk by neighbors having idle conversations. But mostly the birds. More birds that you might think if you weren't paying attention.

As I get older, I realize more and more what a gift it is to be alive to the world around me. Why would I put in headphones when there is so much to be hear every morning?

Looks like your browser doesn't support this (surprising!). You can diretly download the mp3 here

New Spaces

2024-06-17T19:51:00.000Z

Strange Cravings

Whenever I'm about to leave the U.S. for an extended period of time, I find myself craving things I know I will not have access to while I'm away. Curiously, it's usually things I don't have very often. Things that, while here day-to-day, I just don't think about. It's usually laughably stereotypical. Pop tarts, peanut butter, &c. This time around it's root beer. I don't really drink soda that often, it's much too sweet and makes my teeth tingle. Despite this, my anxiety about the future has caused me to go out and buy a pack of root beer from my neighborhood grocery store.

I'm sipping on it right now. Questioning whether it tastes this good because I know that I will be forced to go without it soon. Maybe the threat of scarcity induces a heightened experience for my taste buds?

And now my teeth are starting to tingle and I realize that this is a silly little game I'm playing.

Why am I telling you this?

Consider this a random walk to a brief announcement. I'm moving! By the end of this Summer, my family and I will be in Mumbai, India where we'll be living for the next couple years. Not much time to write in the lead up to the move. Currently we're all running around chipping away at the mountains of paperwork necessary to make sure that they actually let all of us into the country^[1].

If you've poked around the #archive tag for my blog posts, you've probably noticed that a good portion of my original blogs were all travel themed. In fact, that was my intro to blogging back when I was a teenager. It started as a way to catalog & process the experiences I was having as I navigated new culture and modes of being in the world that being an exchange to France was bombarding me with. Perhaps more importantly, it was also a handy way for me to keep family and friends up to date on my life without having to maintain a list of email recipients. I think it's only fitting that I return to this format for this next chapter in my life. The great advantage this time around is that I have built every aspect of this website myself and I own all my own data. As a result I have more control over the experience of reading it.

All this to say, if you like travel, and you want to keep tabs on what it's like to be a mid 30s U.S. tech worker who's suddenly transplanted to a city that's ~31 times bigger than the one he's lived in for the past decade, be sure to keep an eye on this blog^[2].

What to expect

I wont' make any promises about how often or when this feed is going to get updated. That being said, here are a few aspirations I have to make this more fun for everyone involved:

[ ] updates at least every other week^[3]
[ ] better navigation with tags/filters
[ ] inserting a static map at the head of every post tagged #travel that indicates the current location of the post
[ ] will try to burn down my site's backlog before we get too far into the trip

Perhaps the most fraught part is that this includes bringing our dog, Myron, along. It's my first time bringing a family pet along for an international move, and it is already turning out to be a sprawling maze of vaccines, documents, and fixers.
Might be a good time to subscribe to the new RSS feed I just built.
Going to admit right out of the gate that this might slip to once a month depending on what's going on in my life.

Feeder, Finally

2024-06-03T12:20:00.000Z

Long ago, before we sold the open pastures of the free internet to Social Media companies and then asked them to lease it back to us, the federated internet was hard to keep track of. How were you to know when one of the blogs you followed had published new writing? It was a tricky problem, one that was ultimately solved by each site maintaining it's own RSS feed that could be subscribed to.

I always meant to add a feed to this site^[1] , but I kept putting it off. In my head it required me to deal with XML and that felt like a headache. But I've grown a lot since 2018, and what felt like a mountain of spec reading & tinkering a few years ago turned out to be less than 30 minutes of my time last week. This was a nice realization for me. If you were to ask me if I've had much technical growth in the past few years, I'd probably respond that I've had a little but nothing too significant. Revisiting this bit of work on my personal site, however, I can see that I've actually built up quite a bit of technical muscle^[2] that makes the lift much lighter than it was before.

Anyway, enough jabber. Without further ado, I'm happy to announce that you can now subscribe to an RSS feed for this blog:

https://cyberb.space/feed.xml

It's worth noting that my timing is no accident here. In about 2 months my family and I will be moving to Mumbai, India. You can expect to see more frequent posts about our experience here, and now you have a handy way to subscribe and have the posts come to you — just use the feed reader of your choice^[3].

This is even mentioned at the bottom of the post I made when I redesigned this site back in 2018 (ref. re:design)
Muscle is one thing, but I'm also indebted to this blog by Alex Le that pointed out that you can easily set up a feed with a static site generator and some basic templating.
Aren't public specifications great?

Why Does the World Give Us Platforms to Love?

2023-11-12T15:55:00.000Z

Feeling really down about the sudden death of the Bandcamp I fell in love with^[1]. Another reminder that the Market™ does not care about consumers or creators, it only cares about getting money out of its investments^[2]. It's inevitable that culture will become stagnant and die when the only justification for art is its potential to make money.

Now, the company that bought Bandcamp has publicly stated that they "have no plans to change the platform experience." Not to be a frog about it, but we've been here before with these scorpions. We know how this story ends. You can't layoff of half the staff and only keep the ones that maintain the cash register and expect the experience to remain the same. As these vultures continue to make decisions informed by business incentives without any real understanding of the soul in the machine they purchased, the user experience will degrade. This one will be hard to pin down, because it won't be reflected by changes in the interfaces. It will be reflected by absences. A budding scene somewhere isn't written about. Albums curated by a machine with no taste. The vultures will notice that engagement is down and assume that the business is failing because it's flawed. The waters will once again churn with rumors of impending cuts.

As I'm writing this, I'm listening to an album I only discovered because of Bandcamp's editorial work. Kara Jackson's Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? It's beautiful and moody and would not be in my life if it weren't for the people so carelessly discarded by Songtradr.

Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? by Kara Jackson

Only one thought consoles at moments like this: Art and music will live on long after the destruction of market capitalism is a distant memory. Its glistening fangs no longer feasting on the fruit given freely by our yearning souls.

For the unaware: Songtradr lays off 50% of Bandcamp employees
I guess you could say I'm suffering from "ROI'd-rage"

As Good a Blog as Any

2023-08-14T17:33:46.000Z

I recently started reading Don DeLillo's early 90s novel Mao II. Like all DeLillo's writing — even his minor work - the prose itself is musical and transfixing. The novel itself, however, is not the impetus for this post. Rather, I want to express my fascination with the blurb that is included on the back of the paperback copy I own:

This novel's a beauty. A vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing.
— Thomas Pynchon

The fact that the blurb is from Thomas Pynchon is, of course, the first thing that caught me eye. Why shouldn't it be? First of all, one of the novel's protagonists is a reclusive author. So there's a fiendish cleverness in the decision to include a blurb from America's own "notably reclusive" author. What's more, Pynchon providing a blurb for another author's work is a rare enough event that it merits it's own mention on a book's Wikipedia page^[1].

But what kept my attention — and what continued to hold my fascination for longer than it should have — is the final complement of the blurb:

[...] as any in American writing.

I've added emphasis here on the part that's caused me to spiral. The tone of Pynchon's blurb is certainly laudatory, but the use of this qualifier seems to imply that DeLillo's recent novel is comparable to any other American writer publishing at the time^[2]. Pynchon has a sharp wit and a seemingly endless well of knowledge about language, history, you name it — was this an attempt to make a quick joke at the expense of a fellow author?

This question, of course, sent me off on a little journey. I soon discovered that the blurb on my paperback is actually abridged. If you look up examples of the first edition^[3], you'll see that the original blurb was actually a bit longer:

This novel's a beauty. DeLillo takes us on a breathtaking journey beyond the official versions of our daily history, behind all easy assumptions about who we're supposed to be, with a vision as bold and voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing.
— Thomas Pynchon

I note this in passing, purely because it seems to imply that publishers will yank the guts out of a blurb without any indication that they've done so. Still, the "as any" remains in the original.

In a final fit of desperation, I was forced to spend 30 minutes fighting with various internet search engines to try to find a usage post on the idiom "as good as any." Which, if you have any experience with modern search engines and phrases with high-frequency, low-cardinality words (words like "as," "good," and "any"), you'll know it can feel like sifting gold from a muddy stream.

Ultimately, I was rescued from my utter confusion by the tangentially related entry in Merriam-Webster, "as anything".^[4] According to those blessed descriptivists over at M-W, the phrase can be used idiomatically not as a comparative, but as a qualifier to make a previous statement more forceful. Pynchon's blurb is intended to say that DeLillo's vision and voice are not just good, but they are exceptional. Though, I do still maintain that the addendum of "in American writing" mangles the idiom and causes the confusion I experienced.

Essentially, my spiral was probably the equivalent of someone a couple hundred years ago puzzling over the novel use of "damned" to mean "very" (e.g. "damned good") and wondering why a writer would curse something while also describing it positively.

This was a fun jaunt down some atypical English usage that appears that I found confusing on first read.^[5] Here at the end of the journey, I do still hope that Pynchon's intent was to purposefully inject a bit of playful ambiguity into his endorsement. That's just more fun for all those involved for an industry practice that is otherwise a bit of marketing tedium.

I give you Exhibits A, B, C, D, &c. &c.
1991, if you were curious.
a great example of which, I found here
Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “as anything,” accessed August 14, 2023
I'm basing this comment off the fact that there are several forum posts for the phrase "as good as any" that assume it's an equivocation and represents neither a positive nor a negative (exhibits: a & b)

Hobgoblin of the Hypermind

2023-06-26T20:45:48.000Z

"AI doesn't replace work [...] But it does change how work is organized."
-- Erik Duhaime, quoted in Inside the AI Factory

Recently, as I was reading this well researched article in The Verge: Inside the AI Factory, a small, sad truth began to nibble at the edges of my mind. The technology of today creates the potential for massive coordination of efforts. Coordination at a scale so immense that it might conceive and accomplish projects that a single member of the species is incapable of fully comprehending. A networked mind on a nearly planetary scale, dedicated to solving problems. A veritable hypermind to address the hyperobjects we are beset by.^[1]

We see this potential being half-understood and wrestled into the service of "Artificial Intelligence™," as demonstrated by the article linked above. But, as is the case with so many things in our unimaginative and misguided century, it has been harnessed by the vampiric whims of global capital. More concerned with increasing the likelihood that you will buy a trinket or pay for a service than any grand vision of the future it might engender, save for the vague one mentioned in the endless surge of marketing schlock. Capital has no respect nor interest in cultivating such a networked mind beyond chasing the diminishing chemical thrill of increased returns from financial quarter to financial quarter.

The defining spirit of our age is a perverse fable, wherein we continue to believe our salvation will be handed down by some benevolent technologist. Always blind to the truth that we are both the engine that builds it and the minds that might bend it toward a more inspired future.

This is meant to be a riff on the term "hyperobject" coined by Timothy Morton when referring to an object that is so widely distributed across time and space that its full extent cannot be grasped from a single, localized perspective (e.g. Global Warming, Plastic Pollution, Nuclear Weapons, &c.)

Shattered Illusions

2023-03-29T10:56:00.000Z

On the first obviously Spring day of this year, during a lovely bike ride to Georgetown, I broke my phone. I was standing on a rocky patch of earth re-checking the address of my destination, when I needed to move my bike out of the way of a passing group. Holding my bike handle and phone proved to be too difficult. My grip failed and the phone flipped and fell screen-down onto two small rocks jutting up from the grown.

I knew it was broken before I bent down to pick it back up. It was one of those perfect falls that overcomes every improbability as it evades all of my protective measures. Had it landed on its corner, the case would have absorbed the shock. Had it not landed on the rocks but the adjacent patch of grass, the screen would have been unscathed. But no, a fall from that height, onto rocks jutting up out of uneven ground. The perfect trajectory and speed to crack it like an egg. I don't think I could have broken the screen this well if I had been purposefully trying.

Upon retrieving it, I discovered there was not one but two origins from which the interlocking cracks spread. The screen had fallen onto two rocks, one larger and protruding from the ground more significantly, and its shorter cousin about an inch away. The pattern in the black mirror had two pock marks to denote where it had absorbed the brunt of the force. One larger pock mark, about the size of pea. One smaller, but still noticeable, pock mark about an inch away. A network of cracks branched out from each of these two origins like the webs of two spiders frantically competing to build in the confined corner of a room.

At first, I was frustrated and embarrassed. I don't like to replace smartphones more than once every 5 models. This was phone was a 10 and the manufacturer still hasn't released the 15. If replace it now — which is likely, since I'm forever paranoid about slivers of glass embedding in my fingers as I swiped — then I'm going to screw up my rotation.

After some reflection, though, I've had an epiphany: the phone is now inescapably unique to me. These objects, or any of the gadgets made available to consumers these days, are mass produced and their uniformity is fetishized. Everyone who buys a smartphone receives the same sleekly designed object. But now the intricate network of cracks that crawl across my screen are entirely my own. They represent a fingerprint that can't be replicated anywhere else. The screen of my phone as it now exists can only exist because of the historical contingency of the moment I brought it with me and dropped it on those two rocks just so.

This uniqueness. This indelible connection of an object to the historical experience of its owner, is increasingly rare these days, I think. We prefer to sanitize everything to the point where it feels that it transcends our daily existence, that it resists the natural entropy of the universe. Of course, this is an illusion. And so I find myself thinking that I should appreciate it a little bit before I replace it and return to the bland sameness of a new phone.

Bye Bye Birdie

2022-12-14T11:00:00.000Z

Every time I start a new work journal^[1], I like to write a quote on the inside cover that feels like it has some insight into the state of the world as I currently experience it. In my journal for the past couple years, I wrote the following:

"To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self."

— Caroline Busta, "The internet didn’t kill counterculture — you just won’t find it on Instagram" (retrieved on 18-Jan-2021)

This feels particularly prescient as we all watch a decade-old^[2] micro-blogging site be dismembered by a man with the emotional control of a toddler. Oddly enough, I don't think the hostile takeover of Twitter by an ultra rich megalomaniac changed my relationship to the site that much. Twitter has always been owned by ultra rich megalomaniacs, the previous ones were just a little less visible and weren't constantly mugging at the camera looking for approval from shitty viewers.

Spending less time there is something I've been thinking about for quite some time, as evidenced by previous posts on this blog (ref. exhibits A & B). However, with recent changes it is unavoidably clear that staying in a place where my ad impressions directly help prop up the boots of a deranged, fascist-curious oligarch who would remake the world in his own, shitty image. If this is going to happen, I'm going to exercise the only form of direct action I can: I'm going to purposefully remove my contribution to the bottom line.

Is writing a blog about this performative and a bit melodramatic? Yes. Am I still grappling with the things I'll lose by disconnecting entirely? Also yes. I use Twitter to stay up to date on labor fights, local political initiatives, and all these important things that I care deeply about. But I'm making the conscious choice because every additional day I spent on that website after the takeover has made it clear that the decision to stay or go also carries clear moral implications. There were moral implications before, of course, but they could be reasoned away by focusing on the good that sticking around had^[3].

I've pulled my archive and I'll probably spend a weekend figuring out how I want to host it here on my personal site, for posterity. So many formative experience as captured in the last couple years of my Twitter activity^[4] that feel worth archiving.

I find these things are best if you just rip the band-aid instead of scheduling them. Apologies for the short notice. If you're one of the few who followed me on Twitter and you want to stay in touch, I'm still not sure where I'll end up. For the moment, I'm on a mastodon instance as riastrad@zirk.us it's full of academics and writers and is generally quite a pleasant place to spend time.

Ultimately, though, I'll be dedicating my energy to improving my non-digital social network. For the moment, and as best I can, I'll continue cherish and nurture spaces that the billionaire class hasn't schemed their way to^[5].

Yes, this is something I do. No, I don't think it's weird.
Twitter was founded in 2006, so it's not quite yet "decades-old", which is kind of wild to think about.
There are some who have argued that we can't cede this space to far-right reactionaries. That it's valuable despite who's in charge and profiting from our engagement with one another. Notably, I've seen Chanda Prescod-Weinstein pushing back as people talk about ceding the space. I do think she makes an interesting point, but I also don't know that I can fully accept the equation as she outlines it. We have several examples of what happens if we cede the space to far-right reactionaries: Gab, Truth Social, &c. These spaces never reach the same level of impact because they have effectively become echo chambers that leave these reactionaries with nothing to react to, if enough people leave Twitter, the same will play out.
Notably, when the Mapbox Workers Union went public and the network the visibility into contemporary labor organizing this has helped me cultivate.
These spaces also have the benefit of containing considerably fewer neo-confederates and Nazis (i.e. none)

Cyberb-pages Get a Pedicure

2022-11-06T20:35:00.000Z

The Background

When I first set up this personal site way back in 2018, I posted a blog about the process (ref. Re:Design). I also made a list of the things that I wasn't happy about. Among those were the fact that adding footnotes to a post was clunky and involved typing inline HTML to the body of the post. I've been thinking about how to improve not just the experience of writing with footnotes (for myself) but also the experience of interacting with a footnote (for you, the reader).

The Plan

I had a couple ideas floating around in my head about what the end result should look like. First: I wanted to be able to insert footnotes into my blogs without any HTML. While writing, this just feels more ergonomic. Second: I wanted footnotes to appear alongside the part of the blog you were at when you clicked the footnote^[1]. Finally: I wanted the experience of clicking on a footnote link to be the same on desktop and mobile.

A Quick Note on My Own Naïveté

I will admit that in addition to the other criteria I've listed above, I also had this vague notion that it would be cool to do the whole thing in pure CSS. I think this was mostly due to a persistent^[2] misunderstanding on my part about the primary role that CSS serves. I like to keep my pages as free from JavaScript as possible because I find it keeps things, on the whole cleaner. But alas, in my reading of CSS docs, I was forced to acknowledge that CSS is here to style and any feature that requires nuanced interactivity will require me to write a little JavaScript.

Footnotes in Markdown

When researching how I could update my 11ty config to include support for parsing markdown footnote syntax, I was fortunate enough to stumble across this blog from Al Power. I followed Al's recommendations almost exactly, with some slight modifications^[3] to suit the style of my site and the interactivity.

Here's what my config update looked like^[4]:

const markdownParser = markdownIt(options).use(markdownItFootnote);

// fiddle with the default formatting
markdownParser.renderer.rules.footnote_block_open = () =>
  '<ol class="footnotes-list">\n';
markdownParser.renderer.rules.footnote_block_close = () => "</ol>\n";
markdownParser.renderer.rules.footnote_anchor = () => "";

eleventyConfig.setLibrary("md", markdownParser);

I was a little bit wary of swapping out the markdown engine that 11ty uses wholesale, but markdown-it is open source, well maintained, and I confirmed it didn't break any of my existing pages before rolling with it.^[5]

Interacting with Footnotes

Supporting markdown style footnotes turned out to be simple, the trickiest part of this feature turned out to be the interactivity of the footnotes. But first, let's talk about style.

Styling

For styling, I didn't want the footnotes to appear unless they had been clicked on. So the first thing to do was make every element of the .footnote-item class be hidden. I also wanted to make sure that each footnote would be fixed to the bottom of the browser's viewport and stay centered with an appropriate width.

Unfortunately, because I was using fixed positioning, I wasn't able to rely on my base.css that typically keeps things in a nice responsive container depending on the device that's been loaded.

Here's what the final CSS ended up looking like^[6]:

.footnote-item {
  z-index: 998;
  margin: 0px auto; /* next 3 lines center the div */
  left: 0;
  right: 0;
  background: white;
  outline: #000 solid 0.1em;
  padding: 0.5em;
  box-shadow: 0.5em 0.5em rgba(238, 238, 51, 0.6);
  position: fixed;
  bottom: 2em;
  max-width: 80vw;
  visibility: hidden;
}

/* For devices larger than 700px */
@media (min-width: 700px) {
  .footnote-item {
    width: 60vw;
  }
}

The media query is necessary because I noticed that things were looking a bit wonky between desktop and mobile viewports, and I wanted to follow the pattern that I had set in base.css^[7].

Interactivity

Once I had the style right, the only remaining piece was to add the interactivity that would make a footnote item appear when it's reference was clicked and disappear when I clicked anywhere else. Like any feature, there are multiple ways I could have tackled this. I could have queried the body of the DOM for all footnote-ref elements and then added an onclick function - but this didn't help me with the "unselecting" action when a user clicks a second time.

In the end, I went with the most straightforward approach I could think of: an event listener on the whole body element of the page. If I get a footnote reference, I flip the related footnote-item's visibility to visible. To make any selected items invisible after another click, I used a global variable to keep track of which element (if any) has been previously selected and flip it's visibility to hidden.

Here's what all of that looks like in code:

let visibleFootnote = null;

// add the onclick event listener to the body
document.body.addEventListener("click", (e) => {
  // hide currently visible footnotes before doing anything else
  if (visibleFootnote !== null) {
    const previousElement = document.getElementById(visibleFootnote);
    previousElement.style.visibility = "hidden";
    visibleFootnote = null;
  }

  if (e.target.id.includes("fnref")) {
    const textId = e.target.id.replace("ref", "");
    const footnoteText = document.getElementById(textId);
    footnoteText.style.visibility = "visible";
    visibleFootnote = textId;
  }
});

I'm mostly happy with how this turned out. I think my new rule might not be that I shouldn't use JavaScript on my pages at all. Rather, if I do, I'll do my best to only use vanilla JavaScript^[8] with my implementations.

Final Thoughts

It feels good to finally tackle this feature I've been thinking about for the past four years. I honestly don't know why it took me this long. I also have to say, as someone whose work has been primarily focused on backend problems the past few years, it feels good to dig into some front end fundamentals^[9].

Okay, that's all of the words I have on this for now. Hope you like footnotes! You'll be seeing a lot of them in future posts :]

This is personal preference, but I find jumping back and forth from the middle of an article to the bottom of a page a bit disorienting - especially the return trip if the anchor links aren't working quite right.
Maybe willful?
Yes, I am aware that I sound like a comment on a recipe blog here.
To be clear, all of my updates to the renderer are only stripping out additional HTML that I did not need or want.
I also realized that 11ty uses markdown-it as it's default markdown renderer while I was writing this blog. Such is life.
It might seem like an excessive amount of rules for what I wanted to do, but I actually ended up removing a lot of unused CSS because of these updates. Overall I count it as a net positive.
Which I initially stole from skeleton.css
Within reason, obviously. I'm not going to write my own DOM every time I want to interact with elements on the page.
Honestly, it takes me back to being 14 and editing a MySpace page. It's experiential learning in the name of a fun little thing for myself.

A Notational Universe

2022-10-05T13:05:00.000Z

What we're talking about when we talk about the 'verse

There's this astroturfed tech mania recently around this concept of a "metaverse." The portmanteau of "metaphysical" and "universe" is meant to invoke a universe that transcends the physical one we currently inhabit. To my mind, one of the defining characteristics of this concept is that the people betting a lot of money on it are also betting on the fact that everyone takes their claims of its necessity as a given.

Here's my extremely concise summary of the need these companies are simultaneously trying to cultivate and fulfill: people want to be able to take their shit with them wherever they go.

They might dress it up in a lot of different ways with a lot of flashy jargon or demo videos, but ultimately that's all it is. The seamless interoperability of all the different digital systems people use. Though, interoperability may be a stretch. Because the way our markets are structured today, there is no incentive for massive digital worlds to be plugged into one another. Instead the emergent strategy seems to be that it is better to become the universe before some aspiring megacorp can beat you to the punch^[1].

Now, if you're shoehorning the concept of property and materialism into a purely digital world^[2], then this need for interoperability is a natural consequence. After all, in the real world if I buy a T-shirt, I expect to be able to wear that T-shirt wherever I am and not just in places that also happen to be owned and controlled by the same landlord of my T-shirt vendor^[3].

I assume this nascent expectation (i.e. you can take it with you) is what the megacorps are trying to anticipate and monopolize before the rest of us catch on. And who can blame them, when you've extracted all possible value from the physical world, your only hope for continued growth is the conquest of the metaphysical one.

If it sounds bleak, it's because it is bleak

Fortunately, you don't need to rely on "innovation" of bloated technology firms in order to experience the continuity of experience that's promised by the metaverse. There exists a mature, battle-hardened technology that will already allow you to keep track of the less tangible things in your life.

I'm talking of course about the written word and the pages of a notebook. This technology is portable, anything written in one notebook can be copied to another an infinite amount of times. It also has localized support for nearly all contemporary languages. It's also resilient to cataclysmic events, such as solar flares or the collapse of the biosphere.

My personal metaverse is the notebook I use to track what I'm working on, my calendar of social events, any new words I've learned, books I've read, routes I'm running, and so on. There are no limitations on what information I can put into my metaverse. What's more, I can share these with anyone at any time without worrying about compatibility issues or file corruption. Even better, if I track these things in another location (say a dedicated tracking app built on the brittle and quick-to-decay internet), but that location is inevitably raided and stripped for parts by corporate interests, I'm still able to backfill from my notebook data store without any worries.

Empires fall, but my personal notebook metaverse will endure.

Anyway

Even though I spend most of my time working with and on computers, I feel comfortable saying that current technology is nowhere near overtaking the effectiveness and durability of physically writing things down and carrying them around with you. If someone is selling you a technology that implies it's going to be interoperable with every aspect of your digital and physical life, they're either hoping you don't ask too many questions or they haven't actually scoped their project yet.

My own personal notebooks have come with me between cities, jobs, and languages and I've never had a compatibility issue when accessing their information. I don't expect to abandon them anytime soon.

but I digress...
which is generally a bad idea, but that is not the topic of today's post
this metaphor feels overly convoluted, but then again so is this post, so I'm leaving it

What am I reading?

2022-04-10T19:00:00.000Z

Editor's Note: As of November 2024, this blog no longer reflects the reality of how the site's "currently reading" feature works. If you're curious about the how, you can skim this pull request. If you're curious about the why, you can read this blog post.

What is this about?

A couple weeks ago, on a lark, I decided to see if I could have the main landing page of this website dynamically update to reflect whatever book I'm currently reading.

Partly inspired by the fact that I started to use Oku - a neat little minimalist app, to track what I'm reading, want to read, and have read - and partly because I had some time between jobs and I needed a discrete little project to occupy myself for a day.

The resulting feature is a small one. I added an additional sentence in the copy of this site's landing page that will display any book I've marked within Oku as "currently reading."

But, how?

I had basically three requirements for the feature:

The client-side JavaScript should be as minimal as possible. It's the first JavaScript I've introduced on my site and I don't want to overdo it.
I want to display the titles of books and link to them.
There can be N number of books at any one time.

Step 1: RSS ⟶ API

Oku is built by a small engineering team and doesn't currently have any public facing APIs available to query directly. But they do have RSS feeds for any publicly viewable collection on their website. "Collection" is the app's term for an arbitrary grouping of books, either the defaults of "Read," "Want to Read," or "Currently Reading" or any collection made by a user (e.g. "Sitting on My Shelf and Staring at Me," "DNF", &c.).

My initial thought was to write some quick JavaScript to query the RSS feed directly, parse it, and update the landing page. However, the Oku team has good security practices and I wasn't able to do this because of cross-origin resource sharing (aka "CORS") restrictions. This was a minor setback, and also saved me from having to decide how I would parse the feed XML in the Browser.

Ultimately, the project's scope expanded ever so slightly and I ended up writing a lightweight API and hosting it as a Digital Ocean app.

Step 2: JavaScript

Once api.cyberb.space was up and running, adding the script to the page was pretty straightforward. Using the Fetch API, I query the API for my currently reading collection, I receive a JSON object in response, then I pull out the title and link data, slap some HTML on it, and update the contents of the .currently-reading HTML element on my main page.

The flow ends up looking like this:

async function driver() {
  fetch("https://api.cyberb.space/oku/rss/collection/SmX9F")
    .then((response) => response.json())
    .then((data) => extractTitlesAndLinks(data))
    .then((titlesAndLinks) => formatTitles(titlesAndLinks))
    .then((titlesHTML) => updateCurrentlyReadingSpan(titlesHTML));
}

Full code is available here. One fun little detail about this final implementation is that because of how lightweight I keep my website (no custom fonts, inline CSS, and a few other small design decisions). My full site loads fast enough that you can actually see when the JavaScript runs and the placeholder text is updated.

And so.

This was a fun little project. Did I learn anything new? Not really. But I do like seeing these titles updated with whatever I'm reading at given time.

I'm overdue for a redesign of the homepage and I have some ideas in mind. Regardless, I'll probably incorporate this little feature into whatever changes I make.

As a sort of post script, you should consider using Oku! It's nice and uncluttered and the team building it is adamant that they don't want to rely on ad-based revenue to keep it going, which is really refreshing in this day and age.

Reject transience

2022-02-09T15:40:00.000Z

Last Year's Reads

2022-01-27T17:00:00.000Z

Some background

As a personal rule, I set a goal of reading at least two books a month each year. I've done this since college, and I've found that it's the one goal I really enjoy sticking with every year. Without exception.

This past year (as well as the previous one) I actually to exceed my goal by a handful of books. There are no silver linings to a pandemic, but this is one positive note in what have been two really shitty years: this multi-year pandemic we've all been living through has given me a lot of time to sit around and read. One of the least risky ways to keep yourself sane and healthy when a deadly virus is isolating you and wreaking havoc on your community is to sit down with a tall mug of mint tea and a good book.

So here is a high-level break down of the books I sat down with last year, grouped into arbitrary genre categories I just made up off the top of my head:

Genre	Number of Books	Pages
Fiction (non-U.S.)	8	2,459
Non-Fiction	8	2,209
Fiction (U.S.)	6	1,919
Philosophy	5	928
Alternate History	2	592

I'm glad to see that fiction originally published outside of the U.S. is so well represented. Americans tend to miss out on a lot of interesting writing because we only read things written and published in English. I'm also surprised to see that I read so much non-fiction. I've often joked that I don't trust anyone who exclusively reads non-fiction, and it's not something I instinctually reach for in my free time.

Anyway. Enough navel gazing. As a fun exercise, I wanted to include a link to the cover to each book and give it a one to two sentence review based on my recollection. I'll do this below in the order that I read each book.

Reviews

No Shortcuts by Jane McAlevey

A bit academic and dry, but that's to be expected since it's an adapted doctoral thesis. Otherwise, very instructive read.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty

I have to be honest, I started reading this a few years ago and set it down. I only picked it back up when I had some free time at the beginning of the year. Rorty is a virtuoso of philosophical thought in this seminal work. He demonstrates a thorough understanding of the western philosophical canon over the last several centuries, and then proceeds to explain why he disagrees with almost all of it. Dense and thorough, but there's a lot in here that I'll be thinking about and returning to for many years to come.

End Zone by Don DeLillo

Even minor DeLillo is a cut above the rest.

Everything in this book collides with everything else; language, form, function. Intimacy and knowledge are only possible through the pain of contact, the destruction of the self.

Dancer by Colum McCann

I read McCann's Let the Great World Spin a few years ago and loved it. So I came into this one with high hopes.

Unfortunately, he didn't quite hit the mark. It had some really great passages, most notably the opening description about families waiting in Siberia for local soldiers to return home from the World War II front, and there's no denying McCann's talent with the pen. However, in this case, it felt as if he were trying to shoehorn his story into a structural formula because he feels most comfortable with that formula, and not because the style was well suited to the story.

Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec

This is simultaneously one of the most original and fascinating books I have ever read and one of the most tedious.

I don't regret reading it, and there are many passages that stayed with long after the reading, BUT I can't in good conscience recommend a book that itemizes ever single item in every single room of an apartment building in Paris to anyone I consider a friend.

Mules and Men by Zora Neal Hurston

This felt like two distinct books. The first section is interesting, though a bit of an odd mashup between dry, anthropological study and splotches of colorful scene setting. The reasons for these characteristics, of course, are confirmed in the essay on the book’s rough road to publication included in the afterward.

The second section on Hoodoo practices in New Orleans was way more compelling than I expected. Definitely not for the squeamish, though.

Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson

This slim novel was a pleasure to spend time with. Anyone interested in a radical re-imaging of the bends the road of American history might have taken should pick up this book.

Work Won't Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe

This book was selected as part of the Mapbox Workers Union's book club in the lead up to our campaign going public. It's a stern look at the state of work in the U.S., but Jaffe also manages to slip in hope and optimism despite the dismal state of things. It's not the end all and be all of labor writing, but definitely a relevant one to pick up when you need some grounding.

Mortal Engines by Stanisław Lem

This collection wasn't published in Lem's lifetime, and that shows a bit in how uneven the stories feel. It's Lem, so it inevitably has some dazzling and inventive moments. (I'm still in awe of the the brilliance of a Cyber Knight on a planet made of ice doing his best not to think, lest he heat up and melt through the surface and down into its core.)

If you're only going to read one to two books by Lem in your lifetime, first of all how dare you??, but secondly, maybe skip this one. But if you're a completist, as almost everyone eventually becomes, it's still a fun romp through Lem's twisted, comedic world of cyber fables.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

I love it when a book I read inspires me to pick up another, such a direct journey on the web of intertextuality is thrilling. This one ended up on my list after I read Fire on the Mountain earlier in the year and was made acutely aware that, although I have a vague notion of Frederick Douglass as a historical figure, I have not taken the team to understand him on his own terms. In his own words.

This first of his autobiographies is brief, but you feel the urgency with which it was written by the young Douglass. The personal perspective it presents on chattel slavery in the antebellum U.S. is direct and more nuanced than I had initially expected.

Babbit by Sinclair Lewis

A send-up of the emptiness of a life lead under the direction of consumerism and unreflective pursuit of success in modern business. It's almost over 100 years old and the only thing that feels outdated is that the protagonist has to crank his car to get it started.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

Eerie. Horrific. Heartbreaking.

The City & the City by China Miéville

The premise is ingenious. It poses a lot of interesting questions about our ways of seeing one another in the cities we call home. The city in question could be Washington, D.C. It could be Chicago.

Unfortunately, while the premise is one of the most thought provoking I've read in quite some time, Miéville fails to stick the narrative landing and I set the book down feeling unsatisfied.

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise by Georges Perec

A nice bit of experimental fiction. Love that the structure and flow of the narrative is modeled after a computer program.

The Present Age by Søren Kierkegaard

I really have to be in the right mood to enjoy Kierkegaard. If I'm being honest, I enjoyed the playful, smirking introduction og Walter Kaufmann more than the two essays that were meant to be the bulk of this publication.

The Southern Question by Antonio Gramsci

Gramsci is an interesting historical figure. I wanted a brief introduction to thought and writing. I got it, but I can't say that I've retained much after reading this brief pamphlet.

(And to set the official record straight: this stickered-up cover is the result of my using the Open Library Covers API.)

Utopia by Thomas More

Like almost all prescriptive utopian fiction, More’s book piques your interest at first because of its critique of the contemporary culture in which it was written - but ultimately becomes tedious as it attempts to describe a better way of doing things. (Which, I might add, did not age well with its over-reliance on slavery and mercenaries in order to preserve the sensibilities of its citizenry.) Though, it’s worth reading if only for its foundational place in the western literary cannon and its introduction of the concept of utopia.

Anyway. More’s novella is fine, but the edition I have includes essays from Ursula Le Guin & China Miéville. These addenda were insightful and improved the overall experience of engaging with this work.

Beaten Down, Worked Up by Steven Greenhouse

It's written by a veteran labor journalist, and it very much reads like it. That being said, this book taught me a great deal about the 20^th century American labor movement. Spoilers: as Greenhouse gets closer to the recent history of the American labor movement, things start to get depressing.

Favorite fun fact: the first female cabinet secretary was FDR's Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins.

Anarchist Communism by Peter Kropotkin

(Open Library does not appear to have a copy of the cover of this slim little edition.)

This is a brief extract from Kropotkin's larger work The Conquest of Bread. It was much more readable than I expected. Nice introduction to Kropotkin’s thought. I'm excited to read more.

Civilizations by Laurent Binet

It's nice to throw a French language book into my rotation every once in a while. I devoured this book during a late summer vacation, while I was sitting next to a lake in West Virginia. The premise pulled me in, even though bits of it felt a bit tenuous. The fantasy of a world where there currents of imperial power flow in opposite directions is an interesting one to explore and Binet does a great job.

This was just published in English late last year, which means the clock is ticking on it being turned into a long-running television series. I'd recommend reading this now before some clumsy American producers beam their own interpretation into your eyeballs.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

I feel like this had real potential. The writing is great, the story left a lot to be desired. Every interesting theme or story line was left frustratingly underdeveloped.

A Nation of Women by Luisa Capitello

Interesting from a historical perspective. Badly dated as a political treatise. Anarcha-feminism meets The Secret.

The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem

It's Lem. What can I say? Humorous. Profound. Wildly inventive. I have never regretted any time that I've spent reading his stuff.

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

I wish I had read this book sooner in life. A quick read, but each section is packed with insight into how we perceive the world around us. Very highly recommended, which is surprising since it's the book adaptation of a BBC special from the '70s.

The Book of Ten Nights and a Night by John Barth

I've read a bit of Barth's other work (e.g. Lost in the Funhouse, Chimera), so I had a sense of what to expect. Unfortunately, it appears that early Barth is much better than late Barth. Almost each and every story in this collection is concerned with extremely banal formulas and obsessive mid-flight naval gazing and deconstruction.

I fear that this has put me off of his writing for a bit.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Tokarczuk is one of the most talented living authors in the world today. This book is exceptionally well done, a master class in writing a sympathetic, unreliable narrator. One of the best novels I've read in recent memory, maybe ever.

Breaking Things at Work by Gavin Mueller

I picked this up expecting it to be a brief history of the Luddite movement, and an attempt at correcting the narrative that's festered in the popular consciousness. Meuller briefly does this, but then eagerly transitions into a manifesto of sorts for building a contemporary neo-luddite. I was surprised, but not disappointed.

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

"I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards."

I had been meaning to pick this one up for a while. It found me at the right time. Interesting insight into the Spanish Civil War, told by someone still struggling to understand what happened and the role he played in it.

The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes

Prior to reading this, I had thought of Hughes primarily as an extremely talented poet. I now see that he was also an extremely talented writer who saw the world around him with clear eyes.

Ever single one of the stories in this collection will punch you in the gut.

Requiem for a Feed

2021-02-03T07:56:00.000Z

Over a year ago, I wrote about the hoops I jumped through to curb my Twitter habit. At the time, I wrote:

"I've increasingly begun to feel that the only real solution is purposeful privation."

So what did this past year look like? Was I completely off the platform? Not entirely. You can still visit Twitter even if you're not logged into your account. You can still see threads and moments and related tweets. And why shouldn't you? These are all the things that Twitter hopes will make your eyeballs stick enough to keep scrolling.

The gravitational pull of the site is so great that part way through the year I took the additional step of blocking the website at the OS level on my phone. And when I caught myself turning off restrictions to "check back in," I had my partner set a password for changing those settings and not tell me what it was.

It wasn't until I was finally (nearly) fully blocked this way, that I realized that I have other attention-sucking apps on my phone, just with less powerful tractor beams. Without Twitter's interference, they started to pull me in. Funnily enough, Slack was the most frequent culprit of my return to mindless scrolling post-Twitter. I think some part of me knew this already, but Slack is essentially social-media for work and whatever other groups you're a part of. I saw that Twitter was gone, but the hunger for a place to mindlessly set my attention remained. I was like a smoker who's recently quit, suddenly aware that he's developed an oral fixation.

So what did the year off Twitter look like? Well, as you might remember, a global pandemic kicked off roughly 2 months after that post. We've been staying at home for nearly 11 months now, with no real signs of that changing any time soon. What did I do with all the dead time that this entailed? I learned to bake a few new things (and yes, I realize I'm not alone in this), I read 33 books, and I tried to improve my practice of the Dutch art of niksen. There isn't anything super out of the ordinary here. I've done all three of these things prior to turning off Twitter. I don't necessarily think these are things I wouldn't have accomplished if I was still active on the site. But who knows? Maybe I wouldn't have. The problem with making a conscious decision to remove something's influence from your life just before the entire world changes is that it's hard to tell which event is responsible for your actions and state of mind. If nothing else, it's nice to have the peace of mind that my time on a website didn't actively hinder me from doing these things.

At the end of "Kill the Feed" I mentioned that my elaborate scheme involved me getting an email with my log in credentials in exactly one year, courtesy of futureme.org. Well, turns out there was a small hitch in this plan. The email never showed up in my inbox. So, as of right now, I don't have the means to log back into my account or even reset my email. Sure it's probably possible to get back into it, this isn't a blockchain private key or anything. But why put time and energy into falling off the bandwagon?

Honestly? I'm kind of relieved. This past year's endless barrage of tragedy and horror has been disorienting enough without me knowing every thought in the heads of a large bubble of extremely opinionated people. I'm happy to have had the space to process everything on my own, and to be able to cultivate a personal sense of distance and clarity as events unfold.

Looking back, I think pulling away from Twitter is just the first step. As I said, removing Twitter didn't make me X% more productive or suddenly have the time to achieve all my dreams. But it did help me see that my phone is full of apps clamoring to trap my attention. I think that the next step is to cull any app that I find pulling me in. Compulsively pair it down until until the only software that remains has some sort of practical utility.

Who knows? Maybe someday soon you'll see a blog post about my decision to downgrade to a feature phone?

A little Polish polish

2021-01-28T08:00:00.000Z

Problems // Problemy

I've been trying to learn Polish on and off for the better part of ten years. It's a sad thing to type, but it's true. Ten whole years and I have little to show for it except for being able to say the days of the week, a few key phrases like ordering a beer, and some fun swears^[1]. The worst part is I'm not even learning it for any professional or academic purpose. I simply want to be conversant in it. Have a nice chat, if you will. The vocabulary I'm trying to retain is not particularly technical or opaque.

This is pretty dismal. But recognizing that fact energizes me to correct course and refocus my energy. I'm doing my best to break out of the cycle of saying "Sure, I'll get better at it soon but right now I'm swamped with work." The truth is, I'm always going to be swamped with work. I'm always going to feel like I'd rather be watching Netflix or reading a book or tinkering with the CSS of my website instead of practicing some phrases and learning some new words. This is just a fact of who I am. So my problem is about balancing my desire for short term comfort with my need for longer term success.

Opinions // Opinie

I don't think that languages become easier to learn the more of them you have studied. I speak French somewhat well, and I studied Arabic for three years of undergraduate, but even with this experience under my belt Polish feels absolutely impenetrable to me most days. It forces my mouth to take awkward forms and shapes, and my ear has trouble tuning into its subtleties. And yet, I think this is the great thing about learning another language! It truly boggles the mind to recognize that we live in a world were there are thousands of different ways^[2] for humans to communicate their thoughts and experiences.

A significant portion of my friends who speak Polish as their mother tongue have told me something along the lines of, "oh, well Polish is the hardest language in the world to learn." And I disagree, I think every language in the world is hard learn, especially if your goal is to learn it well. Yeah, so what if Polish requires you to conjugate your nouns depending on what role they play in a sentence? In English we have nouns that are spelled the exact same but pronounced differently depending on their context^[3].

Learning a new language is hard and confusing and that is the joy of it.

Solutions // Rozwiązania

My approach this time feels pretty good because it's uncomplicated. First off, I downloaded an app that makes me pay a subscription fee for lessons^[4]. I'm using this app every day to introduce myself to new vocabulary and grammar.

That's it. That's the primary thing I'm doing. Just drilling vocab and grammar constantly and reminding myself that I don't need to speak or understand it perfectly right away. It's only through consistent and earnest exposure that the language will begin to stick.

As a bonus, I'm fortunate enough to have a Polish partner who will look over at me after I've finished one of my lessons and ask "Czego się dziś nauczyłeś?"^[5], which forces me to respond "Nauczyłem się..."^[6] and haltingly recall everything I've just gone over. In these moments, I'm forced to recall things in a more dynamic way and this reinforces all of the learning I've just done.

So yeah, learning a language without any structure except whatever I impose on myself is difficult, as the past ten years have shown. I'm still trying to see if this new approach is going to make any difference. But I'm feeling optimistic at this stage. Ask me how I'm doing in six months.

It is a widely known fact that swear words are the easiest part of language to learn because, like a mischievous child, your brain instinctually recognizes that it should not have them in its possession and immediately stashes them away.
Anywhere from approx. 6,500 to approx. 7,100 ways depending on which dubious website pops up first in your search engine.
Don't believe me? Do you pronounce the phrases "Please press record." and "Play the record." the exact same way?
It's dumb and I sound like some Wall Street shill when I admit it, but putting money into a goal does have a pernicious way of making you stick with it. Maybe this is a consequence of spending too much of my time in the world of stuffy adults, but for my current purposes I'm just being pragmatic. The app is Babbel, for those interested.
translation: "What did you learn today?"
translation: "I learned..."

Counter productivity

2021-01-27T08:00:00.000Z

There is extremely strong social consensus in the tech world around "productivity." You'll often see people post on their blogs about how they are "a bit of a productivity nerd" as they share the latest workflow, tool, or method that has revolutionized the way they work day-to-day. I mean no offense to any of these exuberant bloggers - and if they are truly passionate about this, then who am I to shoot them down? - but every time I stumble on one of these blogs, I feel a bit sad. Because they have completely missed the point.

Here's my few cents: focusing so much on productivity is counter productive.

I feel this way for a few reasons. First, and for what feels like the most self-evident reason, if you spend all of your time reading productivity blogs or onboarding onto the latest to-do list or project management tool, what are you actually accomplishing? I'd be willing to wager cold, hard cash that folks who are single-mindedly focused on improving their productivity don't actually get much done each day outside of researching and evaluating new tools and methods for becoming more productive. Don't get me wrong, I'm guilty of this too. I can't tell you how many times during the work day that I've thought to myself, "This thing I'm currently doing is really inefficient. There's got to be a way for me to fix that." The problem is, the moment I have that thought, the game is over. I almost always catch myself an hour and a half later reading my third or fourth blog on the usefulness of an app I'm going to download, use twice, and then forget about. What I'm saying is that this tendency actively harms my ability to work.

Second, and perhaps a bit less evident on the surface, I think that focusing on productivity is a pernicious way to keep yourself from learning and being creative. In tech, we like to think of ourselves as practical and efficient problem solvers. But we most certainly are not the most practical and efficient problem solvers in our field. Those honorifics are reserved for the machines we program. No engineer can churn through their daily tasks like a machine can. Machines are singularly focused, extremely fast, and they don't need to stop to use the bathroom or grab lunch. My conceit here is simple, because it is impossible for us to be as productive as the machines we program, I believe that the best engineers are those who instead focus their energy on learning well and thinking creatively about what problems to design for the machines to solve.

My point about learning is uncontroversial, I hope, but my emphasis on creativity might be surprising for some. But let me double down, I think that creativity is the most important trait an engineer can have. This comes back to my framing above, that I'll reiterate again: it's the job of the machine to solve problems as quickly as possible; it's the job of the engineer to come up with creative instructions for how the machine might solve these problems. If the engineer is focused on solving problems quickly and not taking the time to think creatively about how the problems might be otherwise understood, then she's always going to feel inadequate compared to the machines she spends all her time with.

And so yeah, it's an uncharacteristic thing for a software engineer to say, but I don't believe that productivity - in the sense that most people have of the word - has very much to do with your competence as an engineer. It's merely an indicator of how fast you are moving. And are there any situations were the speed of an object ever reflect the potential value of an object?

The advice I try to live by? Don't focus on productivity nearly as much as you feel like you should. Taking that pressure off yourself is likely going to make you more productive and give you the space to grow.

Recently Consumed

2021-01-25T08:00:00.000Z

As a member of modern American culture, the characteristic that defines me most within the eyes of society and my peers is what popular media I consume. Thus, I am sharing a few recent experiences I've had with popular culture. After all, as a famous French intellectual once noted:

"... the spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification"
— Guy DeBord, Society of the Spectacle

Watched

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of spending an evening with the directorial debut of Emerald Fennell. Promising Young Woman advertised itself as a femme fatale, revenge slasher film. If you're not quite sure what that means, feel free to watch the trailer.

I was settled in expecting an over-produced film that reveled in the fantasy of an on-the-nose reversal of the power structures that exist. Without going too much into it, I'll just say that this film is not that. It subverted my expectations at almost every turn. The one exception being a somewhat predictable, plot point that reinforces the deeply cynical message of the film. Highly recommend.

Also worth noting, this was my first time during the pandemic lockdown renting a "box office release" at home. It really does leave something to be desired, compared to the shared experience of seeing a movie in a theater. But when the movies well done, that only becomes a minor annoyance.

Read

I recently finished reading the novel Dancer by Colum McCann. I had previously encountered McCann's writing in his compelling work Let the Great World Spin, which I enjoyed immensely. However, with Dancer I was pretty disappointed.

While the writing technique is still strong, it feels poorly suited to the subject McCann tackles. I prefer books where the structure and prose are chosen because they are well suited to the subject-matter, but in reading a second book by McCann I have come to strongly suspect that the structure and style that suited Let the Great World Spin so well are merely McCann's formulae for approaching any of his subjects^[1]. And besides, the tortured, misunderstood genius qua subject of a 300 page work of fiction quickly becomes an incredible slog. Ultimately, I give it 3 out of 5 stars. Rudolf Nureyev is an interesting historical figure because he sits at the nexus of so many historical currents; most notably the Cold War and the AIDS epidemic. If you find him interesting, I recommend a biography.

Listened

Speaking of spinning, I've recently stumbled on an intriguing post-punk band from Ireland called The Clockworks. They're so new onto the scene they don't have any full length LPs out, or even an EP. But the few singles they've released through their label since signing are intriguing. Definitely worth keeping an eye out for them in the coming year.

I think the thing that bothers me most about the realization that McCann's "creative" writing style is most likely repeated from novel to novel is exactly this: it feels formulaic. McCann already writes like an author who has attend several classes on how to write "correctly" in that special way that's sure to catch a publisher's eye. That Iowa Writers' Workshop^[2] style that has been coached and polished until it loses all sense of creativity and invention.
No offense to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who I greatly admire and was on faculty of the Workshop.

habit.

2021-01-24T08:00:00.000Z

I've had the goal of establishing a consistent writing habit scribbled into various notebooks for the last 10 years. A few times, I've nearly made it stick, but I've never gotten to the point where I would call it a "habit".

Trying to better understand why this is, and I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that it has to do with a creatively absurd admixture of reasons. The primary one being the pressure I put on myself to have something interesting to say. Sure, if I were publishing somewhere other than this blog, that might be an important pressure. However, I currently am not, and therefore this pressure is a false obstacle I'm putting in front of myself. I can publish anything here, anytime I want. So why shouldn't I? Within this space, the rules are mine.

Other reasons worth mentioning? I put additional pressure on myself to maintain a militant consistency as I embark upon establishing the habit. I make the plan to write every single day from now until the time and then I despair the first moment I miss a day. Then one day becomes two days becomes entire months. Acc

The final factor I'll mention: I want to write because I am a great admirer of other writers. I am fascinated by the craft and I thrill whenever I see it employed with skill and novelty. However, the energy this admiration stokes is most frequently directed towards - of course - more reading.

Please allow me a quick anecdote. I once had a friend who spoke four languages fluently. He explained to me that learning a new language is always a little bit heartbreaking because your other secondary languages necessarily suffer as you dedicate all of your focus to learning the new, unfamiliar one. But, there's a wonderful moment once you reach a certain level, he assured me, once things are clicking into place, you begin to regain the ability to return your focus to the other languages in your repertoire and sharpen them back up.

Accepting that my reading routine will suffer for a bit as I seek to improve my writing routine, is, I think, a necessary step in establishing a true writing habit.

The Year that Wasn't

2020-08-21T17:00:00.000Z

I've recently noticed that a new pastime has emerged when talking with friends. The ritual is pretty simple, usually someone will say something to the effect of "back when we thought the lock-down was only going to last two weeks," and the rest of the group uneasily chuckles as we all mentally note that we've been in this state of societal shutdown for the better part of six months.

Morbid Context

I'm writing from Illinois on the first real vacation of the year. Of course, I use the term 'vacation' here in the loosest possible sense. This is the first trip back west to visit family where I've found myself doing a mental risk benefit analysis. Will this decision ultimately bring harm to my loved ones? It's a hard emotional state to parse. Wanting to be close to family. Knowing that this impulse may cause you to bring an incurable disease to their door.

But of course, I must also acknowledge the insane amount of privilege required to take paid vacation as the world around me continues its free fall into chaos. This is a glaring undercurrent of many of my posts and is something I hope to write about more explicitly in the future.

Uneventful Horizon

I've previously written about locking myself out of Twitter. The idea being at the time, that if I didn't have direct access to my account, I would squander less time and less mental + emotional energy endlessly scrolling. To some degree, this convoluted exercise was a success. On the other hand, it has also been a failure. I will still catch myself returning to the platform's "Explore" tab in search of news. The awesome - and I'm using that word in it's original sense - strength of the site's gravitational pull is terrifying.

Emergent Narrative Tropes

Shortly after breakfast this morning, I found myself reading about the rapid growth of a new gang in the District's suburbs. I was struck by the fact that this article's narrative arc very closely resembles the one employed in business magazines when talking about the meteoric rise of the latest tech start-up.

I'm not sure if this has to do with the lack of range that journalistic narratives like this one allow themselves, or if it is simply a symptom of being hopelessly entrenched in the view point of a capitalist society. But at times, it reads as if the article is saying:

"Yes, the illicit activities are unpleasant and frightening, but you've got to admire how scrappy and fast these young kids are! They've really managed to disrupt the existing market players, and take a sizable chunk out of the total available market."

I find myself wondering if this narrative form is present in any journalism that relates to the pursuit of unhampered capital growth. A research dissertation for another day, perhaps.

What's Next

I've taken off a sizable chunk of time^[1]. While some of this time is set aside for catching up on the backlog of responsibilities that slip when you're locked indoors during a plague (e.g. sleep, physical fitness, car maintenance, etc.), I hope to give some time to catching up on my reading and writing. One of my largest sources of guilt at the moment is that I have yet to establish a consistent writing routine^[2].

For an American (2.5 weeks).
Another topic for a future post, perhaps.

Notes from Quarantine

2020-05-29T08:00:00.000Z

Washington, DC (my place of current residence) has had a stay-at-home order in place for just shy of 3 months. This means several things, most importantly it means that people are dying in our hospitals and the global and local economy are going to be limping along for the foreseeable future. I'm posting this today, because today is the day the Mayor has announced we'll be entering "Phase 1" of reopening.

There have been plenty of think pieces and lengthy Twitter threads about the havoc that this health crisis has wrought, so I'm not going to wade into those heady waters. I think that Jonathan Sturgeon captured it best back in April, so I'll drop his words here and leave it at that:

"[...] global capitalism is like an animal that suffocates when it fails to move. Meanwhile, human beings everywhere suffocate without ventilators, especially the poor and elderly and sick. Not metaphorically."
-- Care Package

Editor's Note: This post is my first attempt at a shorter format in an attempt to write here more frequently.

Kill the Feed

2020-01-10T08:00:00.000Z

Historical context

I'm not extremely proactive on Twitter. I post very rarely and when I do it's often trivial little things. That being said, I am extremely passive on Twitter. By this I mean that I'll log in at different times throughout the day to scroll through the feed and see what's happening in the world. However, more and more I'm realizing that even this passive engagement is unhealthy. I find myself in a state of endless scrolling. I increasingly feel like a duck destined for foie gras who's being force fed a bunch of fatty junk.

I started out the year thinking I might just trim down the list of who I'm following and set up some stricter content controls on my devices. But I've already caught myself side-stepping these guard rails less than a few weeks after putting them in place. I've increasingly begun to feel that the only real solution is purposeful privation.

Encouraged by seeing similar posts, most notably Andy Bell's AA-inspired confessional, I have decided to finally take action and cut the supply off at the source. What follows is a brief description of how I performed this reverse Houdini.

Convoluted solution

Use a password generator to create a random 15 character string
Update my Twitter email and append the random string as a + alias (thanks, gmail)
Drop the full email address into a message to myself for a year from today (thanks, futureme.org)
Change my password to another random string
Throw away the new password (i.e. don't save it)
Write blog about this process
Post blog to Twitter so everyone knows where I went
Log out of Twitter on all my devices

If you see me liking, retweeting, or tweeting in the next year, then you'll know I've outsmarted this little scheme and failed at this goal. Otherwise, see you all in 2021! 👋

Rapid-fire Reading Reviews

2019-08-18T09:00:00.000Z

I enjoy reading. I sincerely find it to be one of the most rewarding and affordable experiences that life has to offer. And to be totally transparent, when I say this I’m talking about analogue reading. That’s reading words on physical paper without notifications or a connection to the Internet.

I’m finding as I get older that reading has become one of those rare moments in life when I get to sit without distraction and focus deeply on a single subject. Yet, more and more I find myself cramming my personal reading. Frequently, I do it on the bus during my daily commute. While I am still able to focus, this forces me to context switch quickly when I arrive at my destination, without taking time to reflect on what I’ve just read. Writing short personal reviews is a way to counteract this lack of reflection and give myself space to absorb each work.

Earlier this year, I set a goal of writing one review for each book that I read this year. My original goal of writing one review post per book has proven to be - how can I put this? - a chore. Rather than agonize over a post for each book I’ve read since Borges, I’m just going to drop a bunch of quick thoughts on each book in this single post.

This is mostly a personal indulgence and a way to soothe my goal-oriented conscience. If you happen to be reading one of these books and appreciate someone else’s opinion, well that’s fine too.

Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller

This one is on my list of books to read before I die or go blind. Without soliloquizing too much about times gone by, I remember seeing the title on a poster in a Barnes & Noble when I was an angsty teenager and thinking that it must be a pretty punk rock book.

Reading a play is often much different than reading a novel, and reading a play from the first half of the 19^th century is no exception. The premise, execution, and emotional weight of Miller’s play are well executed. Descriptions of the setting are minimal and well thought out.

However, I can’t help but admit that, while I think the work was important at the time and packs a large emotional punch, the language and drama felt a bit heavy handed. It has much to say about a persons value under mid-century capitalism, and I never felt like my time was being wasted.

Title	Author	Rating
Death of a Salesman	Arthur Miller	✱ ✱ ✱ ✱

Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis

I grew up on C.S. Lewis, which may be to his detriment in this instance. His style is very familiar to me, so this work didn’t feel particularly inventive.

With Faces, you get a sense that he was very proud of himself for rewriting a classic in a way that was more intellectually satisfying. You can’t base an entire novel on scratching that sort of itch, though. Beyond this central insight that the myth of Psyche and Cupid only makes sense if Psyche’s sister, Orual, can’t see the palace where Psyche is living with her own eyes, it doesn’t feel like there’s not too much going on.

As the title of this novel has been rattling around in my brain, I’ve begun to find the use of “Till” instead of “Until” to be stylistically oppressive. I’m not sure why.

One point this novel really hammered home for me, reading Lewis as an adult and not a young child. with the impact of what I like to call The Agenda on the narrative structures of his writing. However, that’s a topic for another post.

Title	Author	Rating
Till We Have Faces	C.S. Lewis	✱ ✱ ✱

Fiasco, by Stanisław Lem

Ever since I first read Solaris a few years ago, Lem has been lodged firmly at the top of my list of favorite authors. Fiasco only served to crystallize my high esteem for his body of work.

After reading Lem, you find yourself questioning the premise of all other Science Fiction. His purposeful refutation of the anthropomorphic. His relentless exploration of the true implications of humanity coming into contact with other sentient life.

I won’t even get into the specifics of Fiasco. It’s truly great and you should read everything Lem has ever written. I would also say that the narrative structure and pacing of this book rival that of Solaris, though I don’t know that the comparison is worth too much as the two novels seek to explore different aspects of Lem’s overarching thesis.

Title	Author	Rating
Fiasco	Stanisław Lem	✱ ✱ ✱ ✱ ✱

Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk

We are so very luck that Jennifer Croft took the time to translate this work. I have no sense of how the original work read in Polish, but this English version is worth picking up and doesn’t feel as watered or standardized after being translated.

Flights did some very interesting things and it did them very well. The stories visceral, psychological explorations of historical and fictional events. These tiny vignettes were all connected by thematics and structure, but not connected narratively.

Honestly, I really enjoyed reading this book, but I think the one thing it missed was some sort of unification aside from just thematic elements. It felt more like a collection of short stories than a novel. Maybe the fault is mine for coming to it with different expectations than I should have.

Title	Author	Rating
Flights	Olga Tokarczuk	✱ ✱ ✱ ✱

Under the Glacier, by Halldór Laxness

Laxness is best Nobel Prize winning author you’ve never heard of.

This book stood as a nice counterpoint to Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. Rather than shoehorning myth into the strictures of modern Western values and story conventions, Laxness does the exact opposite. The guiding themes and sensibilities of the story seem to grow from Icelandic myth, and you are pulled along by them.

After reading this, I immediately went out and found a copy of Independent People a less “experimental” novel written by Laxness pre-Nobel. I’m very much looking forward to reading it.

Title	Author	Rating
Under the Glacier	Halldór Laxness	✱ ✱ ✱ ✱

Slouching Toward Bethlehem, by Joan Didion

I find that I have a hard time reading non-fiction. I often confirm this by looking back at what books I read each year and seeing nothing but literary or science-fiction novels.

I’m not sure what caused me to pick up this collection of essays by Didion, I think it was the use of the W.B. Yeats quote in the title and the Author’s Introduction. Didion’s style is clear and she writes with a sharp eye. Each topic she addresses is given the same scrutiny and her inability to keep from seeing the broader implications for culture in had me devouring each one.

This collection, though it’s written exclusively on topics from the '60s, felt extremely relevant to today.

Title	Author	Rating
Slouching Toward Bethlehem	Joan Didion	✱ ✱ ✱ ✱ ✱

Less, by Andrew Sean Greer

This book was recommended to my by several people. I should note that I am frequently grabby about accolades along the lines of “Best Seller List” and “Pulitzer Prize Winner.” The former means just that a large amount of people have bought the work, not necessarily that it’s a good book. The latter means that this work likely appeals to the biases of the fellow writers who are on the reviewing committee.

This book is a “Pulitzer Prize Winning New York Times Best Seller,” so it is starting out at a disadvantage. I am also very surprised at how drastically my reaction to this book differed from many other people’s. I found the protagonist and the entourage of surrounding characters to be flat, the stakes to be laughably low, and the ending to be as predictable as the ending of a Disney animated film.

That being said, I can’t say that the book was poorly written. Greer is strong in several ways and he does write well. I just don’t think he’s strong in the categories that I give the most personal emphasis to.

Title	Author	Rating
Less	Andrew Sean Greer	✱ ✱ ✱

Billy Bud, Sailor, by Herman Melville

One thing you should probably know about me is that I’m a Melville completist. I read Moby Dick, or the Whale one summer in college and I have been hooked on his prose ever since.

Billy Bud is a short little novella that was published posthumously and still feels somewhat under gestated. The premise of the novel feels very much akin to a Thomas Hardy story, i.e. how do bad things happen to good people? Yet, even with these caveats, I found myself so intoxicated by the rhythm of Melville’s ornately structured and punctuated sentences, the morally charged monologues of his characters, and the subtle inconsistencies of certain plot points in the final few chapters that it was not an unpleasant read.

Title	Author	Rating
Billy Bud	Herman Melville	✱ ✱ ✱ ✱

The Swamp Thing, by Allan Moore

I’ve had Allan Moore’s run of Swamp Thing on my list of things to read since High School, and I am glad that I finally got around to it. Moore is one of the few authors whose writing is so strong that I’ll be along for the ride regardless of my gut reactions to any other aspect of the comic.

In the first issue of this run alone, Moore somehow manages to completely disassemble the previous myths of an already well-established character and put it together in an original way despite the strictures of writing a comic that exists within the context of a larger “narrative universe.”

Title	Author	Rating
The Swamp Thing	Allan Moore	✱ ✱ ✱ ✱ ✱

Northlanders: The Iceland Saga, by Brian Wood

I grabbed Northlanders from my neighborhood library on a whim. I had read the first volume of this graphic novel a while ago and remember enjoying it.

This volume was less engaging than the first. While Wood’s writing is strong throughout, the stories did not feel quite as compelling and the use of stylistically dissimilar artists throughout the series made for an uneven, disjointed experience between each vignette. Honestly, this last point impacted my experience with the book much more than I expected it to.

Title	Author	Rating
Northlanders: The Icelandic Saga	Brian Wood	✱ ✱ ✱

The Invisible Interface

2019-07-04T09:00:00.000Z

During my relatively brief time in the “real world” I’ve noticed a bit of a pattern when teams are frustrated about their tools. The knowledge that I’ve noticed a pattern. Regardless of how novel my epiphany is, has lodged itself in my brain long enough that I’m desperate to have it removed. This post is more an attempt at exorcism than it is ground breaking business theory that I’m eager to share with the world.

OK. Caveats out of the way. I want to talk to you about why “that great new software” that’s going to solve your frustrations with work won’t actually solve your problems. Regardless of what some marketing team has been whispering to you via social media ad campaigns.

Now, I haven’t thought about this hard enough to have clear delimitations or a taxonomy of which types software this pattern is most likely to appear alongside. But in my experience it’s any software focused on coordinating the efforts of more than 3 humans. I think it applies mostly to project management software, but I’m going to speak in broad and general terms so as not to limit the future potential.

A Hypothetical Workplace Situation

The scenario begins like this. Something about someone’s job is frustrating. Let’s say it’s keeping track of a feature requests for the product your company makes. Let’s also say, for ease of reference, this person’s name is Émile. Émile’s frustration stems from the fact that his team is responsible for tracking and prioritizing these feature requests. But there are so many requests, and each member of his team keeps track of them in a different way! When Émile needs to sit in meetings and talk about what’s most important, he feels unprepared. One day, Émile stumbles across an advertisement for a new software, HubSite™. HubSite™, the copy reads, is designed exactly to help teams more effectively track and prioritize feature requests. Émile is ecstatic. He launches a propaganda campaign to rally others to the cause of using this software at work. He is convinced that it will save him from the nightmare of running around in circles trying to pull this information from disparate sources every week.

You use tools, they don’t use you

The sad truth is that HubSite™ will not save Émile. In fact, it will most likely add an additional layer of administrative overhead to his job responsibilities. New software requires teams to learn how to use new software. To make matters much, much worse, new software is often introduced into environments that already use an alternative software to meet these needs. Moving information and updating human processes are significant changes that require dedicated work.

To wax Durkheimian for a moment, the dysfunction exists not because of the existing tools but because of the social conditions that fail to alleviate this pain in the first place. Computers are number boxes. They store the numbers when you provide them, and they provide the numbers they store when you ask for them. That’s basically it. The root cause of the frustration is that Émile needs to have consensus among his team on how best to keep track of the information that his team is capturing on a regular basis.

Yes, design is important. And I don’t mean to discount the fact that there are some exceptionally poorly designed softwares out there. But there are also some really poorly designed softwares that work exceptionally well for teams! The ideal solution might be having team members put a post-it note on a designated wall after any meeting where a customer mentions a feature request.

The crux of the matter, to my mind, is that as long as everyone on the team is aware of the system and understands how to participate in it most effectively, the system will work.

Social Consensus > Tools

I think the core of this thought, and the one I’m currently spinning in circles trying to express, is that between your brain and the keyboard there is always another invisible layer of user interface. This layer is the social and cultural expectations you and your team has built around that system. If you do not take this layer into account, and instead jump from software to software - always telling yourself that this next tool is going to solve all your problems - then you will be dogged by frustrations in everything you do.

An Entirely Different Set of Questions

2019-02-04T08:00:00.000Z

This was my first introduction to Borges - or as his translator affectionately refers to him through the footnotes "JLB" - aside from the errant short stories I read spasmodically on the internet c.2007-11. Back when I had more time to read random short fiction on the internet.

Borges is a cerebral writer of the first order. Although, somehow that classification feels too limiting for what he's able to achieve. The prose is sparse and unladen, though this could be as much due to the standardization that occurs in translation as to Borges's style itself.^[1]

For the most part, the stories in this collection all seemed to orbit the same core ideas of knowledge, memory, and how these relate to and change a person's identity. The book itself had more stories than I could possible get into here, so I'll just briefly note the few stories that I dog-eared^[2] while reading.

The House of Asterion

A common thing when reading Borges, as I discovered via these stories, is finishing a story and immediately flipping back to the beginning to re-read. I felt this most sharply with this short story about a character trapped in a maze, The House of Asterion. I won't go into more detail. It's too great to ruin even sixty years after it's publication. I earnestly encourage you to read it yourself, if you haven't already.

In Memoriam, J.F.K.

This one is almost a free-form poem. Less than one page, and Borges manages to do this amazing thing. It's hard to put into words what about it exactly spoke to me without ruining some of the magic of the first read. I'll just say that this story had the best opening and closing lines of the entire book. It begins with the explosion of a muzzle and concludes with the inevitable. It is absolute, dark, and beautiful.

The Aleph

The titular story of this collection is one that takes seriously the possibility of knowing everything there is to know. The protagonist is shown an object that contains the entire universe within it. There are so many clever little details in how the story is set up and unfolds. The thing that led to the eventual aforementioned dog-earing of the page, however, is where Borges takes the story in the final movement of the narrative.

It is also a good demonstration of the fact that, for Borges, the premise isn't simply a gimmick to hook the reader into a compelling story. In fact, this final turn, where Borges extrapolates what would actually happen if someone had suddenly seen the entirety of the Universe, hammers home the point that Borges isn't just imaginative as most writers go, he's also interested in an entirely different set of questions than almost any other author you'll read.

There are some classic authors that you read only to discover, with a bit of heartache, that their work doesn't impact you as a reader in quite the same way that other (more laureled) critics had led you to believe it would.

It was a pleasure to discover that Borges was not one of these writers.

Title	Author	Rating
The Aleph and Other Stories	Jorge Luis Borges	✱ ✱ ✱ ✱ ✱

One of the things I've found re: reading translated texts is that, no matter how well they're are translated, there is always a lingering doubt of whether or not the stylistic choices are the author's or the translator's. By no means, am I noting this with the intention to discredit the work of Andrew Huxley. It's just a pernicious thought I've never been capable of shaking when reading in translation.
It's worth noting I almost never dog-ear pages of my books. The fact that I have dog-eared pages of this collection is a sign of the impact these stories had while I read them.

A Brief Critique of Power

2019-01-17T08:00:00.000Z

Author’s note: I made two personal commitments at the beginning of this year^[1]. The first was to blog a bit more often. The second was to proactively read more books. These two goals dovetail quite nicely if I write a brief review of each book I read this year.

General Impressions

There is no denying Naomi Alderman’s ability to write a compelling story. I tore through this book in large part because the prose is gripping and elegant throughout the book. The premise of the novel, and her initial treatment of it in the first few chapters had me ripping through the book faster than I expected to.

Structurally, the narrative perspective and voice rotates among several protagonists, which feels like a common practice in most mass market works of fiction. I don’t begrudge Alderman this choice, though.

The final point that Alderman seems to make as the novel reaches its climax is an interesting one, and certainly one that was much more measured and considered than I expected - though it’s a fairly bleak one to make. Interestingly, whereas the common premise of most feminist^[2] dystopian^[3] fiction have emphasized privation of women’s freedoms, Alderman makes her point by doing the complete opposite.

We watch as the normative structures of power are quickly and precisely inverted. The reader can only watch in muted horror as this inversion, which initially holds the hope and promise a society different from our own, gives way to the same structure with different roles. This is a truly interesting point and one I’ve found myself contemplating after putting down the book last week.

So I'm giving it 3.5 out 5 stars.^[4] For me, certain unquestioned premises in the narrative flow merit criticism. Alderman makes a handful assertions or leaps of logic that I first assumed to be authorial attempts at injecting ambiguity and unreliability into the narratives for particular protagonists. But I was disappointed to discover that these insertions were in fact cornerstones of the story that was unfolding.

By way of example, I found it particularly irksome that the first and only explanation for the cause of The Power turned out to be the actual cause. Maybe this comes down to reader preference, but I would have much preferred several conflicting accounts with no definitive answer ever being emphasized.

Sometimes science-fiction authors are hesitant to let doubt remain in their stories. I think this might be by virtue of the genre or maybe even reader expectations, but I would encourage authors to ignore the emphasis on providing “objective truth" in this way. Authors should be comfortable leaving some questions unanswered, it helps readers come to terms with the universe's lack of objectivity.

Gripes and Nitpicks

Setting aside the story and its execution for a moment, I have a few nits to pick with certain decisions Alderman (or her publishers/editors) made in terms of the actual printing and layout of the book.

Why do contemporary publishing houses insist on incorporating visual elements in the story? There is an increasingly common practice that I cannot support, and I'm noticing more and more that it has to do with the story including some sort of reference to digital forms of communication. Is the protagonist of this chapter receiving an e-mail from someone? The reader will never know unless we print this section in a sans serif mono spaced font! This section is supposed to be an internet forum? How will our poor author’s audience understand what’s happening unless we change the font and put all of the comments in annoyingly formatted CSS looking boxes?

I realize this is a question of personal aesthetics. But if I wanted information conveyed via a combination of text and visual elements, I would read a graphic novel.^[5]

Finally, there's the framing gimmick of the story being told as a historical narrative from 5,000 years in the future. Combining this with the “archeological” illustrations sprinkled throughout the book really irked me. Honestly, I could live with the framing device, but the the illustrations could have died on the editor’s desk and I don’t think the story would have suffered for it.

Final Pronouncement

If you’re looking for a well written, entertaining book that will shock^[6] your sensibilities about gender and society, look no further. Just know there are some little things that might nettle your literary sensibilities (if they are at all like mine).

Title	Author	Rating
The Power	Naomi Alderman	✱ ✱ ✱ ✱

They’re not “resolutions”. Please don’t call them that. “Resolution” has so many potential meanings that I prefer to not use it in this context.
Though the thesis of The Power makes me question whether or not “feminist” is even the right word here.
Ibid.
If you've already scrolled to the bottom and are comparing against the table, you may have noticed a small discrepancy in the rating. Technically, I’m giving this book a 3.5 out of 5. But I haven’t decided what my rating system style should look like in practice and I’m using symbols as placeholders. As a result, I’m rounding up to four “teardrop-spoked asterisks” for this review.
In fact, I do this often. I enjoy that medium.
Pun very much intended here.

Blog Re:Design

2018-12-30T08:00:00.000Z

Why did I do it?

Being a mobile-focused Support Engineer at Mapbox means that I tend to focus on non-general languages and design patterns that are specific to proprietary platforms. The considerations and constraints are very different from something as sprawling and globbed together as the World Wide Web™. But this doesn’t mean that I haven't been required to rub elbows with web development here and there.

My original website was up for about 8 months before I decided it needed new life. You can see the extremely simplistic site I initially made courtesy of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. I made this site quickly and haphazardly during some downtime between jobs (no lie, I hand coded my resume bullets in vanilla html). It certainly shows. Although I don't expect very many people saw it in that state, I was unsatisfied with this first, naïve attempt at building a web page and was craving an excuse to get more exposure to some modern web development tools and systems.

In the interest of posterity, I want to use this inaugural blog post to walk through my motivations for redesigning the site and using the tools that I used.

What tools did I use?

I want to give credit where credit is due and run through a list of the tools I used to host, design and build the site in its current form. If you’re not interested in my long-winded justifications and (likely inaccurate) descriptions of these tools, the site is Open Source on GitHub where you can see the structure and code (warts and all) for yourself.

Neocities

This piece hasn’t changed recently, but I think it’s worth documenting. I use Neocities to host this website. It’s a cheap solution (on their “supporter” plan it only costs me $5 a month to keep this site up and running) and it provides SSL support by default. This saves me from having to get tangled up in any of the minutia of dotting the ts and crossing the is for my basic configuration, which I think should generally be the point of a hosting service.

And I’ll be honest, there are other solutions I could have used. For example, Netlify has been getting some buzz lately. This can likely be attributed to the "Free for Open Source" tier in their pricing plan. However, Neocities will always hold a soft spot in my heart because they are also early adopters of IPFS^[1] and advocate for a more permanent solution to how the web is structured and maintained.

Skeleton CSS

To be perfectly blunt, CSS is an area of web-development that have absolutely no comfort with. I’ve known CSS and how it relates to HTML since my edgy days of editing my edgy MySpace™ page^[2] style back in Junior High/High School.

I knew that it would be faster for me to use a boilerplate CSS library and tailor it to my specifications that it would be to start wholly from scratch. But I didn’t want to use some big, ungainly, and wholly generic (as a result of its ubiquity) thing like Bootstrap.

No kidding, I literally searched the phrase minimal css boilerplate and was lucky enough to find Skeleton CSS. The library is small, clean and easy to get up and running with after you browse it’s documentation.

I didn’t want the library loading from an externally hosted server, and I also wanted to tweak certain elements like buttons to my liking, so I downloaded it added it my site’s assets and began to tweak away. In addition to the core modifications, there were also elements that I wanted to customize that weren’t already addressed by the framework. To keep things clean(ish), I implemented these changes as a separate CSS asset.

Google Fonts

This is currently the primary thing about the site that I don’t like. This is a misleading way to state this, let me clarify: I am sometimes haunted at night by the thought that Google’s Fonts are so easy to use that one day their servers will go down, or the company will monetize it’s Font business more aggressively and suddenly millions of web pages (this one included) will look deformed and grotesque.

So yes, while I did momentarily fall in love with Roboto Mono and add it to this new and improved version of my site. I think I can accomplish a similar ascetic by other means once I get over the hump of understanding the best way to bundle a font and remove the external dependency. I’ve already put this one on my “minor skills to learn in the coming year” list (which I’m partially tracking on the repo).

Nunjucks

Like CSS, JavaScript templating is another area that I do not feel extremely comfortable with. I know it’s a critical part to getting things running smoothly with a site generator - but I had no idea where to start. Don’t tell the project's maintainers this, but I didn’t put too much consideration into this and ultimately defaulted to Nunjucks because that’s what all of the examples in 11ty’s documentation were written in.

After starting this my site refactor, I found out about Mustache and the concept of “logic-less templates”. Personally, I found that Nunjucks suited my needs and made enough sense once I took the time to read the documentation a bit more closely. So I didn’t investigate, compare, or attempt to rewrite my layout templates after I learned about the other possible solution. That being said, no solution is ever final, so re-visiting my approach to templates might be worthwhile if I have time in the future. I’ll also note that this is the one area where I don’t feel that I’ve done my homework very well.

11ty

Based on my needs an interests, I knew that I didn’t want or need anything more complicated^[3] than a static site generator. Selecting a generator actually proved to be one of the harder aspects of the project. I’ve had minor brushes with Jekyll in the past, and while I appreciate the lasting contributions it’s made to this area of web development, it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi that I was looking for in terms of structure and usability.

At work I’ve had the pleasure of being able to use the extremely the sleek, and open-sourced Batfish library, but I decided against opting for this familiar tool for two reasons. First, if you are a barista and you spend all day making espresso, the last thing you want to do when you get some free time is spend it making more espresso. I wanted to get a sense of what else was out there and see if there were flexible and (most importantly) user friendly generators gaining traction outside my current circle.

Second, Batfish is lightweight, but it’s made with much beefier projects in mind. Hell, it’s used to maintain all of my current company’s sprawling documentation. I don’t expect my site will need to be nearly as dynamic or massive, so I want to keep things nice and simple. Preferably only needing to use a build and serve command when developing, with minimal configuration or tom foolery required to get things up and running.

At some point during my research, I came across 11ty. 11ty checked all my boxes, had clear documentation and examples, and seemed very easy to get up and running with one Saturday afternoon while I was browsing for tools.

I also have to be perfectly honest and admit that to get over the learning curve^[4] I did a fair amount of cribbing from the eleventy-boilerplate blog put out by Dan Urbanowicz.
(👋 Thanks, Dan!)

Why are the majority of blogs from before 2011?

It’s no fun designing and building a website without content. I had some lame, test content written when I first started working on the blog section, but it was uninspiring and I was having trouble seeing the bigger picture with just a handful of stand-in posts.

Fortunately, during the holiday break I had a moment of inspiration! When I was younger and traveled, I had maintained travel blogs. These old blogs were currently sitting precariously on 3^rd party blogging sites that I didn’t control. At any moment this part of my personal digital history might disappear^[5] and there would be no recourse for getting it back.

This prompted me to decide to migrate all of my old posts over to this new blog I was building. It also provided an ample opportunity to tweak my site's blog structure and design as I added more and more content to it. Round a corner here. Tweak a spacing there. Add a word count, just because I started to get curious along the way.

Now I’ve got Suburban Berber and Josh Has Gone French dated, tagged, and archived on this site. This site that I manage and style and I’m quite pleased with the look and feel of the posts. If you’re curious about my past experience living abroad or just want to see how different my writing style was years ago, feel free to click around. I pulled them over in the exact same state they were in (title typos and all), the only thing that’s changed is the style.

Overall it was a fun trip down memory lane, and I’m glad I had the thought and time to follow through.

Declaration of My Goldilocks Strategy re: Web Development

Of course, even after putting all of this effort into polishing up the site, there are still things that are still squatting in the back of my mind that I’d like to improve. For posterity's sake, and to preempt any potential criticism from my peers, I’m going to list my primary nit picks here and now.

The /work/ page is not interesting or easily maintainable
The site's home page leaves something to be desired (both in terms of content & style)
I’m not currently show casing any fun, creative dev projects I’ve worked on
My current footnote implementation is clunky and I hate it
My blog doesn’t have an RSS feed or any Newsletter functionality
I have a Google Font dependency

These are all the ones I’ve noted so far. When inspiration strikes, or I see something I want to change I try to add it as an issue to my repo. Since this site will only ever be maintained by yours truly, and even though I’m managing the site and related projects via GitHub, I’m not actively trying to follow best-practice code conventions (e.g. I have definitely committed to master more times than I have ever done in a professional setting).

My main goal is to make updates to the areas I want to improve, or use it as a learning tool to gain familiarity with a concept, tool or system, in a low-risk environment. I’m casually referring to this as a “Goldilocks Strategy” toward my site's development and maintenance.

I’ll be making minor tweaks to every piece until it all feels just right.

IPFS is a very interesting project that I’ve been following for the last few years. I won’t get into it because it’s tangential to this blog. But if thinking about how to improve the structural integrity of the system that currently stores an increasingly large share of all of humanity’s knowledge, communication, and creativity is your jam, I encourage you to check it out.
Don’t look for my MySpace page. It’s long gone, I assure you.
Don’t worry, I know that static-site generators can be extremely complicated if they want to be.
Just to clarify, this is definitely the result of my inexperience with web development and limited exposure to the structure and functionality of static-site generators.
Yes, I’m noticing that resilient systems and future-proofing my digital footprint appear to have become a re-occurring theme in this post.

Kobayashi Maru

2012-07-24T08:00:00.000Z

I have returned home from Tanzania. In fact, I returned approximately one month ago.

First and foremost, I would like to thank everyone who helped me take this trip with their generous donations. I assure you that your personalized thank you cards will be in the mail shortly.

If you're interested in getting right to the pictures, you can find them at the end of this post (click to enlarge, of course). For those of you interested in the type of emotional toll a two-week trip to one of the most impoverished nations on the face of this Earth takes on a person, kindly read on.

This short trip has caused me to suffer from a sort of ambivalence. I loved it. I hated it. I passionately tried to understand it. I don't think I'll ever fully understand it. There is only one certainty that I posses after an experience such as this: one does not visit Sub-Saharan Africa without being changed. I'm not entirely sure how to explain this. In fact, I'm convinced that no matter how hard I try to convey even a small fraction of what the Sub-Saharan experience entails, I will assuredly fail to describe with any accuracy the paradox of it all. The murky turmoil that an experience such as this one creates within my inner psyche. It's been almost a month and I'm still struggling with some of the things I've seen. It's one thing to know about the state of affairs over there, it's something else completely to understand the implications this has for everyone involved.

I won't delve too much into the specific details of my trip. Those things are best left to personal conversations (or maybe my future memoirs?). But there are some specific moments I would like to share with you. The drive to our construction/camp site, for example. We flew into Nairobi and proceeded to board a bus for six hours until we arrived a small village school about a forty-five minutes outside of Moshi's city limits. You see, Moshi is one of Tanzania's larger cities, and it's also the capital of the Kilimanjaro region.

Anyway, it's not the destination I want to share with you, but the voyage. Since a good portion of the drive was between the two major cities, there was a significant stretch of smooth, paved highway. Once we had passed Moshi, however, and headed toward the village, the reality of Africa began to set it. The roads slowly eroded the longer we continued. Little by little, potholes began to multiply, bumps became more jolting, until we eventually came to a series of unpaved road. Now, it is important for you to realize that when I use the word "unpaved," the average North American reader has no point of reference. There is no equivalent to this type of road stateside. Nothing even comes close. In fact, to call it a road is a grave understatement. Every inch of that path was jarring and uneven. The bus we were in was definitely not suited for off-road travel. With every shake and prattle, the group cringed with the realization that at any moment a vital part of the engine might drop off the vehicle.

It was during this drive that I began to realize one of the biggest schisms between my world and the world of Africa. Security. Of course, I've been in prior situations that have lacked any feeling of security. I've traveled to developing countries before. But the security I was missing was so much more than a simple sense uneasiness. What this security is or was, I'm still not sure. Part of me has concluded that I must have taken basic infrastructure for granted my whole life, and the sudden loss of it created this feeling. Another part of is convinced that it's the insecurity that that can only from visiting communities that don't seem to posses the means to preserve their own human dignity. A fact made even more unpleasant when you realize that your mere presence creates the stark contrast necessary for this indignity to become tangible.

Once we arrived at the site, we were greeted with brilliant smiles and open arms by swarms of school children. That's something else about Tanzania. The desire to learn. The school our team worked on was experiencing low attendance before our renovations. Not because the children thought that school was dull or boring. But because parents feared that their children would become sick if they were forced to study in such unsanitary conditions.

A word of caution to any who might wish to take a trip similar to the one I've just taken: no matter who you are or how much you do, at the end of your toil you will not feel that you've made a difference. That's Sub-Saharan Africa, though, there is always more work that needs to be done. I spent a total of 7 days on the work site. Seven days: one complete week. A very short time, I am aware. After each day of work, I would take time to sit and think about the day. Almost every single day that I pondered over the group's collective labors, I realized that we had hardly done anything to improve the lives of those in the community. My initial reaction was to assure myself that this was simply because of the time constraints of our itinerary. But over the course of that week I slowly began to realize that I could spend 10 years with that community, work until my muscles ached and my bones were bruised, and I would still go to bed with that feeling of shortcoming.

I fear that I've begun to ramble. As you can tell, there are parts of this trip that have left a long-lingering bitter taste in my mouth. Tanzania, and Sub-Saharan Africa in general, are difficult places to visit, and I would not be so brash as to recommend them to everyone I meet. However, despite the filth and poverty, and overwhelming sense of guilt and helplessness that inherently comes from traveling to such places, the people are vibrant and outgoing, and so much more worthy of the things we take for granted than we ourselves are at times.

It is probably best that I end on that note. For those of you have been patiently waiting for pictures, here they are:

A pre-renovation classroom.

The main school building that our group worked to renovate.

Our campsite.

A nice view from our campsite.

All the local villagers had to walk to the school for their water, our campsite was en route.

We worked with these local workers to help start construction on a new kitchen for the school.

I periodically tried my hand at artsy photography.

My contribution to our group's finished classroom

Oh, did I mention we went on a safari before we left?

Once again, thanks for taking the time.

'مصير كل شمس الغروب'

2011-12-09T08:00:00.000Z

The past few weeks have been overwhelming. You may probably have guessed this fact in light of my recent lack of posting anything. Either that, or you think I'm lazy and don't want to keep you, my beloved readership, up to the minute on my comings and goings. Shame on you! I HAVE been busy, and in fact, I have several things I need to talk to you about. But, before I dive into the deep emotional introspection that I know is imminent, I am going to swim around in the shallow end of simple fact reporting and get used to the temperature of the water. I know that you're probably thinking that I took that metaphor past the point of making sense, but I'm feeling a little overly melodramatic today (for reasons that shall be revealed during my afore mentioned introspection) so prepare yourselves for a lot of excessive, misguided metaphors.

Last weekend I participated in a group trip to Fez. One of the oldest cities in the history of the world. It was really fun, and the only downside was that we were only there for one night and a total of about 24 hours. There was much to see and much to do. If there's one thing this program has perfected it's the cultural and travel aspects of an exchange. In the short time that I've been here I've seen almost all of the major cities and been able to experience unimaginable things. Below are a few of my favorite pictures from the weekend. If you want to see more you can find them here.

<< Previously linked to deactivated FB account. >>

Overlooking the city

The King's Palace in Fez. Apparently there's a 9 hole golf course inside.

An entrance to the Medina. Fez's Medina has over 9,000 roads so we made sure to stay with our guide.

Decorations at an ancient Medresa

Dramatic Angles!

Fez is known for it's intricate mosaics. Here is a behind the scenes look at how they're made.

So that's my recent trip in half a dozen pictures. Recently, I was able to experience Morocco's public baths. What the local's here refer to as the "hammam." It was something I had put off thus far, because, for all intents and purposes it sounded like something that would make me extremely uncomfortable. But let me tell you, it was anything but that. Now, I could go on and on trying to give you a description of what exactly it was like, but experience has taught me that it's impossible to describe something as amazing, and unconventional (by American standards) as a hammam in a way that does it complete justice.

So yes, on a completely surface level, if I tell you that I paid a little less than 5 USD to strip down to my boxers, lather myself in olive paste, and have a stranger scrub me down in a steam room, it sounds ridiculous. Believe me, I too was once like you, skeptical and cautious, but my eyes have been opened. I have never felt cleaner or more refreshed than I did in the moments following my emergence from that hammam. It was wonderful, and I'm going to try and go back again and again for the short time I have left here.

Which brings me to the reason for my deep introspection. In the past week, the decision has been made and finalized that I will be coming home for the spring semester. This decision was anything but impulsive and has been reached through a very taxing, stressful process of re-examining my academic and financial priorities. Though I know the benefits of staying would be innumerable, and I can see every hardship and frustration I have endured this semester blossoming into knowledge and cultural understanding, I cannot justify the possibility of prolonging my education and falling deeper and deeper into an ever growing debt.

So after much deliberation, and countless e-mail exchanges with numerous advisors, I made my official decision this past week. Once I began to address this dilemma, I knew that no matter what decision I made it would be bittersweet. Especially since I'm just beginning to feel comfortable with my host family, the city, the culture, (not so much the language, but that's my own fault), and the idea of being more than just a tourist in a place like Morocco. But life is full of bittersweet decisions and I would not have made this one if I was not fully convinced that it was the right one for me at this time.

Morocco is a beautiful and mysterious place, and I am not going to exclude the possibility of returning in another context. At at time that is more justifiable academically.

As a result of this decision, my final month in Morocco, because that's really what it's coming down to right now, is not going to be easy. Already I have made a check list and realized that if I'm not careful I may have a stress induced brain aneurysm. In the next three weeks I will be busy registering for next semester's classes, which has already proved to be a bit more difficult due to the fact that most of the classes are already full; writing up a syllabus for my independent study Arabic class next semester, one of the terms of my return as per my scholarship requirements; changing my plane ticket; preparing for all my final exams here with the program, that's right I'm still a student; finding a place to live, it's not as easy to sign a lease while in a different country as you might expect; and preparing for a late December visit from Karolina before finally heading home three days before the semester starts. This next month is extremely dangerous for someone who has a genetic disposition towards hypertension.

So I apologize if, in this most crucial time for updates, my blog becomes uncharacteristically silent. I hope you'll understand that I'm extremely busy trying not to die from an anxiety induced heart attack. I'm making gradual progress on all of these fronts of course, and I'm very confident that next semester will be exceptional despite all of this stress and difficult decision making.

The title of this post is an Arabic proverb that basically means, "the destiny of all suns is to set."

And on that note, I'll leave you. Thanks for reading.

For the Name's Sake.

2011-11-28T08:00:00.000Z

Well friends, I have taken another weekend excursion. This time to the Western Sahara. It was a wonderful time, as well as a welcomed diversion from a difficult decision I have been trying to make over the past week or so.

The trip was fairly straight forward. A group of seven students made plans with a private driver who made the long journey faster and much more convenient. We drove 10 hours to a small town called Merzouga which sits right on the edge of the red-tinted (or so I'm told) dunes of the vast desert. Once we got to our check-point - a small hostel - we took time to rest up before our Berber guides showed up with camels.

We rode those camels for two hours into the desert, until we found a camp. I can't speak for the others in the group, but I personally formed an intense bond with my camel over those two hours. His slow hobble, and unsightly gait will be sorely missed from the rest of my exchange. Anyway, due to the fact that we were not going during the typical desert trekking season, it was rather cold and windy the whole night we camped out. Nevertheless it was a great adventure, and I'm happy to share a few of my favorite pictures with you.

I was in the very back, which made for good photo-ops.

Just an all around cool picture.

My faithful steed throughout the trip: Special One.

We matched! I think that's why we bonded so well.

The sunset over the Sahara. The picture doesn't do it justice.

If you want to see more pictures you can find them here.

Aside from that I don't have much more to report. Life here keeps marching on as we approach the end of the fall semester. It's been a bit stressful for everyone, and I'm sure I'm not the only one in my group who's been having minor panic attacks as the days in the calendar whoosh by. Of course, my situation is a little different, but I won't get into that until it's absolutely necessary.

In the meantime, here is a long overdue haiku:

Western Sahara

Oh! what mystery you hold

Kaleidoscopic

As always, I'll be sure to to keep the updates coming as frequently as possible, but until then, thanks for taking the time.

¡Eid, Carumba!

2011-11-08T08:00:00.000Z

A quick word of caution: this post contains graphic descriptions of cultural experiences. If you are easily put off by hearing details of cultures that are dramatically different from your own, then you may want to skip this one. Consider yourself warned.

Where do I begin? Barely two complete weeks have passed since my last post, and holy sweet crap a lot has happened since then.

Two weeks ago, on the 7th of November, my week started out quite differently from any of the other previous weeks that I have experienced thus far. I woke up rather early, had an uncharacteristic family breakfast with my charming host family (the Ammors, they're quite wonderful people) as we watched National Moroccan T.V. and waited for the King to come on and wish us all a happy Eid. However, in typical Moroccan fashion the King was late and we were forced to finish breakfast and continue with our morning preparations for this traditional Muslim holiday without his blessing.

Once breakfast was finished and the table was cleared, I was given a djellaba and the family packed into the car and headed for the Tamara house (the larger house were the extended family lives, and were I end up spending most of my time).

Now, a quick explanation for those of you who don't know what Eid is: this one of several annual Muslim holidays. This particular Eid is one where Muslims celebrate Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Ismael and God's mercy. The celebration consists of slaughtering a sheep, keeping one third of it for your immediate family, one third to your extended family, and the final third to the poor or needy.

Because we celebrated this Eid with the extended family it meant that before lunch - and much too soon after breakfast - I witnessed the slaughtering of 6 sheep and 1 goat (someone in the family has high cholesterol, apparently goats' meat is better in such circumstances). Now, as someone who is finely attuned to social cues and all subtleties of human interaction, I came to the conclusion that for an outsider such as myself it would be somewhat inappropriate to take pictures of this religious holiday and plaster them all over the internet. Instead I offer you two pictures: a before and an after. In an attempt to cushion the impact of the "after" photo I have my friend and fellow study abroad student posing in the foreground...you'll see what I mean.

This was sheep number three. I think he knew what was coming.

The thing about witnessing the slaughtering of animals that is hard to describe isn't the imagery. No imagery can easily be conveyed through text. I could tell you about how the freshly sharpened blade of the butcher hired by the family slipped seamlessly through skin, muscle, and tissue as the prayer was made to dedicate the sacrifice to God. I could tell you about how the blood poured from the throat of the prostrated beast with less effort than water flows through a stream, and I'm sure that you could imagine it with ease. But nothing I write here can make you understand the sounds.

The sounds are what got to me. An avid zombie film watcher who passed his childhood playing violent video games, I felt weak in my knees as the gurgling, gasping sound reached my ears. Nothing can prepare you for the sound of life leaving a living creature. The sound is what I remember more vividly than any of the images I saw that day.

The big smile of my fellow scholar helps distract from the corpses in the background.

After the sheep were killed and gutted, we had lunch. Due to the fact that fresh meat needs time to dry and marbleize before it can be cooked properly, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the first day of this two day celebration consists of eating only the "parts" as someone put it. So for lunch it was a lavish spread of liver wrapped in fat and cooked over an open flame, charbroiled heart, and a massive communal plate of stomach smothered in a secret sauce. The meal was all mental, and happily I made it through, and was able to to take a second helping of liver. For dinner we had soup. No sheep, just soup. I was overjoyed. The next day, me and my host family returned to the extended families house in Tamara for a delightful lunch of sheep's head couscous. And so, although eating sheep tongue, eye, and cheek, greatly tested the limits of my cultural experience mentality, I wouldn't take back any of it. And I certainly will not be doing any of it again any time soon.

After the two day celebration, I began my previously planned trip that took me from Porto to Lisbon and then finished in Madrid. 'Twas a whirlwind week and a half. Since most of the stories from that trip are better suited to be recanted in person (i.e. they consist of touristy tom-foolery), I'm just going to let the pictures to do the talking...more or less.

The main square in Porto

Porto is currently in the lead for "Josh's future retirement locations."

The sunset over Porto.

One of my favorite pictures from Lisbon.

Madrid.

The statue of Don Quixote, my man, in Madrid.

The bull fighting arena in Madrid.

Needless to say it's been an incredibly diverse and quite rapid couple of weeks. And to top it all off, I returned from my European journey only to find that one of the extended family had had a child the week I was away. So two days ago the entire extended family got together again to celebrate. I'll leave it to you to assume how this type of thing is celebrated. (Here's a hint/outright explanation: the world has one less sheep since little R'bab was born.)

So there you have it, life here continues to push my Western comprehension of the world. But then again, that's what I signed up for and that's why I am here. For those of you who've gotten to this point, thank you. It warms my heart to know that you're just as interested in my experiences as I am in egotistically sharing them in a public forum. Here's a little something to express my gratitude:

<< Video is no longer on YouTube 😥 >>

Maroctober, Looking Back.

2011-11-05T08:00:00.000Z

I must apologize, my cherished readership. It appears that I have been neglecting my audience. Almost a month between posts is unacceptable. There is a reason for this, though. I have slowly come to realize that I am in my slump.

For those who might not be familiar with it, a slump is commonly experienced during any significant time abroad. It is the period in which the mystery and allure of a new country slowly fades away to boring routine and unending frustration. It is, more or less, the most difficult time for me to achieve anything except for a state of stoic apathy towards everything and everyone around me.

(To my friends who are here with me: disregard that statement about "everyone." It's mainly just for effect.)

I am a bit surprised of course, after charting my progress compared to my previous year in France it would appear that my slump has arrived around a month early. No logical explanation for this has come to mind. I suppose a few possibilities might be because I am more aware of it this time around, my circumstances are different, or because each experience is a separate, unique experience and I'm foolish for comparing the two.

In any case, I have been continuing to do some amazing things despite this slump. For example this past weekend I travelled to a beautifully "azure-d" town in the north of the country called Chefchaouen. I highly recommend this mountainside town to anyone visiting Morocco. Here are some pictures to explain why:

I said "azure", but that might be wrong.
To be honest I have trouble with blue.

It's hard to remember you're in a slump in a place like this

No matter where you go in the city, you will most likely have to walk uphill.

The view from the highest point in the city.

During this weekend excursion we also travelled to Ceuta, Spain. While it was nice to visit a city that in my opinion is best described as a bit of "European dandruff" that fell down onto Morocco, it was only a two hour excursion whose main purpose was to renew our 90 day traveller's visa and save the study abroad program coordinators a bunch of work. That being said, I had a lovely two hours of making a fool out of myself in Spanish.

Unfortunately the battery on my camera was running low, so I have absolutely no pictures to back up these statements. On the other hand I ameliorated my Spanish speaking capabilities ever so slightly, so that should be proof enough.

So there you have it. As per usual you can find more pictures from my weekend here. There some stuff I left out, including a two hour hike to an amazing waterfall.

I should also probably inform you that I am officially on my fall break vacation. So I will be doing nothing but exciting adventurous things for the next two weeks. This upcoming Monday is a very important Muslim holiday which consists of slaughtering a sheep in celebration of God sparing Ishmael from being sacrificed by Abraham. The party lasts for two days. After which I will be setting off for a week long Portugal/Spain trip. I am hoping to update you sometime after the holiday and before I leave, but don't hold me to that. In any case I will surely take the time to fill you in, dear reader, before the end of the month...hopefully.

So until next time, whenever that may be, thanks for taking the time

Seasons of Change.

2011-10-19T08:00:00.000Z

Originally I had planned to devote this entire post to my recent weekend trip to Marrakech, Ourika, and Essaouira. While I still plan to devote the majority of it to that, I have also come to the conclusion that there are some crucial social and emotional realizations to be discussed as well. As the title may have hinted at, I am currently fixated on change. Not the pocket kind. The kind everyone back home is undergoing and the kind that I am beginning to recognize in myself more and more each day.

Now you might be thinking to yourself, "Whoa, Josh! I didn't click that link to hear you blabber on about the things you miss or you think are changing. Get to the good stuff!" Rest assured I will share my thoughts on my weekend excursion with you. In fact here's a picture from the weekend to help keep your appetite for travel stories at bay. An appetizer, if you will.

The historical medersa of Marrakech.

Now I know that an artistic angle of an ornately decorated doorway is hardly enough to satiate your hunger for travel and adventure. Don't worry, I'll try to keep the emotional blabber down to a minimum. That being said, I believe that I have some extremely interesting insights and you should take the time to profit from this rare peak into my wealth of wisdom.

I think the best way to begin is by sharing a story from my previous exchange in France. During the second half of the year I was away my parents informed me that they had made the decision to refurnish the living room of my childhood house. This was a small, necessary thing to do for the family's living room. In fact, it was long overdue. It should have been something insignificant and trivial that I took into account and moved past. That wasn't the case.

I freaked out a little bit. First when my parents told me they were doing it, and then again when I finally got home later that year. I made a rather large deal, saying things like: "This isn't my home anymore!" and "How can I be comfortable when it feels like I'm in someone else's house." I meant it at the time, even though now I've grown to appreciate the changes they made and the warmth they bring to the space. But I've thought about that living room a lot, and I realize now that my anxiety and misguided frustration were not due to the fact that things had changed. Change is constant and should be expected, only willfully ignorant people will tell you otherwise. No, it was due to the fact that those things had changed in my absence. Nothing is more difficult to bear, in my opinion, than the realization that Earth keeps turning regardless of where you're standing on it.

I believe Ponyboy quoting Robert Frost said it best:

Of course, this clip is more melodramatic than the point I am trying to convey. But it's in the same vein and I thought it helped illustrate the idea to some extent. Especially the part where he admits that he doesn't quite understand it.

That's what I've been meditating on these past few days. Anything can spark this type of introspection. It could be me realizing that I've adapted to certain aspects of Moroccan culture (i.e. being berated by every Moroccan greeting simultaneously), hearing that my Uncle is engaged (congratulations Dan and Judy), or calling my significant otter and learning that she got her nose pierced on a whim (I know I'm overreacting I just need to get it all out right now, kocham cie bardzo). All of these instances poke and prod my psyche and remind me that change is happening despite all my best efforts. I recognize the necessity of change, despite my propensity to wish that it wouldn't happen, and I know that I will grow and mature because of it. But sometimes all you want is to sit around with someone you love and watch awful movies all day.

All this to say that I have reached a very scary point in my time abroad. The part where change becomes distinguishable and (to a certain degree) tangible. That essential, but unbearable increment of time where I am not fully adapted to life here, but I realize that if I were to go back home I would be greeted with similar circumstances.

Just a quick side note, this update is not meant to be depressing or overly sentimental about the comfort and habits I left back in the states. So I should mention that there are, in fact, many things here that I have experienced and learned that I could never hope to appreciate or experience elsewhere.

I now expect to be served mint tea at social gatherings and as a companion to bread and olive oil during an additional meal (a sort of tea time) during the day.
I have learned a new way to eat avocado as a dessert, using only a spoon and some sugar.
I have grown to appreciate Moroccan music that once seemed tinny and out of key to my Western ears.
I can take public transportation around my town without feeling anxious or paranoid that everyone around me is * trying to steal my wallet.
I am slowly but surely starting to understand conversations in Moroccan Arabic, the emphasis here is on the word "slowly".

Anyway, wow! I am so sorry that it has taken me this long to get to a point where I can finally talk to you about my weekend trip. If you have read up to this point, I commend you. I don't think I would have. As a reward here's another picture from my trip.

This man is carving with his feet.

So this weekend, as I said, I traveled to Marrakech, Ourika, and Essaouira in that order. It was a whirlwind of a weekend and I had an "amazigh" time (excuse the pun). The cities were amazing, each in their own distinct way. So although our trip went against ever notion of cultural acclimation that I have in my body (we stayed in hotels catering towards Europeans, and our activities were primarily touristic), I had a wonderful experience and I made some wonderful memories. Not to mention all the fantastic pictures I took.

The shoe stores of Marrakech can be overwhelming

Those odd looking things are called "palm trees"

The logistics of the trip are as follows: we left for Marrakech early Friday morning and stayed there for two nights (Friday and Saturday). Sunday morning we took a short day trip to a beautiful restaurant hotel in the town of Ourika which is nestled in the Atlas mountains just outside of Marrakech. From there we traveled to the quaint port city of Essaouira.

The port city of Essaouira

Overlooking some of the artisans' shops.

So there you have it, you are now fully caught up on me and my comings and goings. If you're interested in seeing more photos, as always you can find them here. There was a lot to see and do, so there are plenty more pictures.

Additionally, if you remember my previous blog about my frustration with the language situation here in Morocco and are interested in learning more, I would like to direct you to a post on my fellow compatriot's blog. She goes to Stanford, so don't be surprised if there is a considerable difference in the level of vocabulary used (my thesaurus can only do so much for my writing). But seriously, Cyana has some keen insights and expresses them quite well, I strongly encourage you to read her blog.

In any case, I have come to the end of my update and I would just like to share another video with you as a nice way of rounding out the whole discussion on change:

So until next time, thanks for reading, and please don't forget to stay gold until I'm back.

Above It All

2011-10-09T08:00:00.000Z

This has truly been a whirlwind weekend. As I mentioned in previous posts, a small group of study abroad students made plans to summit the highest peak in North Africa, Jbel Toubkal. To help convey the gravity of that statement I have prepared a picture for you using window's paint:

Our goal was in that circle.

So, hopefully that helps give you an idea of what our weekend had in store. There were six of us, and we planned to summit and get back within two days. Guided by a few understated guidebook explanations of the trek and an undeserved sense of capability, we took the 5:50am train to Marrakech. From there we took a taxi to Imlil, the town at the base of the mountain, and we were able to begin the first half of our trek at around 1:20pm. We had an 8 mile hike to the refuge, where we would sleep Friday night before attempting to summit Saturday morning.

The first half. An 8 mile hike to the refuge.

Despite the fact that we all had read and knew that altitude would be a factor, we were set on getting to the top of that beast of a mountain and returning to Rabat within two days. On the first day of trekking the group was forced to separate into two groups of three because of a slight difference in pace. This decision, while not ideal, was made in order to ensure that there would be six open beds at the refuge. Luckily there were, and we were all able to have a horrible night's sleep in an unheated stone building in a valley between two mountains. That might sound cool, but believe you me, after getting to 3,000 meters (9,842 feet) elevation all you really want is a hot shower and some good soup. We had neither.

(There's a part of our first day's trek that I'm really hesitant to include. However, I feel it helps convey just how hard we pushed ourselves this weekend. In a half hearted attempt to save myself from blatant embarrassment, I decided to share it with you only in parenthesis. In the last half hour of our first day's trek to the the refuge on Friday. I puked. I puked hard. Twice in fact. I am ashamed to say it, valued reader, but it was not pretty. The cause of this sudden expulsion is uncertain, and it came as a complete surprise to everyone, myself included. The most plausible excuse at this time is the rapid altitude change and my lack of acclamation. It happened with the refuge in sight, and I was able to push myself that last leg. Needles to say, that after this little setback I wasn't sure how I felt about going all the way to the summit.)

The view from the refuge. The end of the 1st day.

We woke up early the next day, Saturday, with our hearts set on the summit. Despite my trouble toward the end of the previous day, I felt drive and a sense of reinvigoration pushing me onward. We left at around 7:30am, give or take a few minutes, and despite the trek being only 3.6 miles in total we did not make it to the top until a little bit before noon. The trail was much steeper and considerably more hazardous. It was a very humbling experience for all of us. As anyone who has ever climbed a mountain can tell you, it is trying in every possible aspect. By the time we made it to the summit we were exhausted physically, mentally, and any other way you might think possible. But believe me, once you stand on top of that mountain everything else fades away. There are no words to describe the feeling that you get looking out from the tallest peak and realizing that you carried yourself there with your own two feet.

That's 13,671 ft. for all you Americans.

On top of (part of) the world.

After that morning, which was one of the most productive mornings I have had in a long time, we decided to hike all the way back to Imlil and try to catch a taxi to Marrakech in hopes of catching the last train back to Rabat. Ambitious? Extremely. Of course this put our total hiking distance for the day at around 16 miles. And as we later figured out, the total distance walked/hiked this weekend was about 24 miles in two days. So you can understand why my body currently hates me. We ended up accomplishing the ambitious goal of getting back to Rabat. I got back to my apartment a little bit before 3:00am this morning. I am tired and dirty, despite large amounts of sleep and showering. I do not think I will be able to truly bask in the glory of this accomplishment until my mind and body have recuperated. Near the end of October sounds about right.

In any case it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. And I don't mean that in the standard use of the phrase. I mean that I don't plan on climbing any more mountains any time soon.

Here's a nice group picture that we got from the summit, courtesy of Laura Gwen, and thanks to a nice Hungarian couple that we met along the way:

It still feels kind of surreal.

If you are interested in seeing the rest of my pictures you can find them here. They come with identifications of my fellow alpinists and snarky comments. I would give you a haiku or something, but that's going to have to wait until next time. I am so tired I could sleep until Wednesday. So until then, thanks for taking the time to catch up with me.

Ugh. Homework.

2011-10-02T08:00:00.000Z

It's a Sunday night and I'm waiting for my significant otter to get online. For this reason I have decided to put off homework so that I might, well, blog about homework. I have successfully survived the first week of actual class and thus far the homework has been pretty light in all my classes. Save one. Modern Standard Arabic, I am slowly realizing, has the potential to become the bane of my existence during these next few months. Here's a picture of half of the first exercise I had to do over the weekend.

Please excuse the poor lighting

The picture quality isn't the greatest, but that's only because my notebook is literally sitting on the desk right next to me and I took the picture mid-blog. Like I said, procrastination. It's nice to be back into a routine that allows me the luxury of procrastination. My schedule for this semester didn't turn out quite the way I would have hoped. I'll be taking a class on the Qu'ran, a "core" class on Moroccan culture and history, a political science course on Morocco's relationship with Europe (this one is in French), and two Arabic courses for Moroccan Colloquial Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, respectively. It seems like a lot when you write it down, but in all honesty, aside from the homework I've been putting off this semester seems like it is going to be a lot less stressful than any other semester I've had the pleasure of enduring back home at the University of Illinois. And I certainly won't have enough homework to dissuade me from ascending Toubkal, the tallest peak in North Africa, this upcoming weekend. Nor will it dissuade me from any other occasional weekend trip that might strike my fancy.

All this to say that I finally have homework to prevent me from blogging. This blog is a testament of my commitment to you, dearest reader. I will not let something as frivolous as 4-5 exercises in MSA stand in the way of keeping you up to date on my adventures. Not even a midterm could prevent me from using this beautiful form of procrastination.

Dichotomy of a Language Imbroglio

2011-09-29T08:00:00.000Z

im-bro-glio

noun.

"An extremely confused, complicated, or embarrassing situation."
synonyms: complication, snarl, clusterf---

My weekend plans have been postponed until next weekend. In that time I have decided that an important piece of the puzzle that this blog is slowly helping you put together is missing. The giant center piece known as language. Communication and its constant, consistent failure is a daily part of the life of any student spending significant amounts of time abroad. I and the others here are no exception.

This puzzle piece has been frustrating me to such an extent that I looked up a new word to help describe it. I realize, however, that it is necessary to explain just how much of language headache a country such as Morocco can cause. And believe you me, that is the understatement of the century. I would provide you with a counter example of other understatements, but I'm tired and that would take some degree of thinking. But I digress.

Let me lay it down for you nice and pretty. An average day in Morocco has me speaking and/or hearing any of four possible languages: English, French, Modern Standard Arabic, and Moroccan Colloquial Arabic. That's not even considering the ten minute block of daily news given in Berber, nor does it take into account the lingering Spanish that's only a short drive north from the town I'm staying in. Needless to say, Moroccan is a veritable cornucopia of language induced headaches. But that's not even the half of it.

Oh no, dearest of readers, there's much more to this polyglot than meets the ear. Here language has become much more than just a means of communication. It has become an indicator of social status and quality of education. This mostly coincides with the use of French and MSA used by people on a daily basis.

Generally you can expect almost everyone you meet here to speak French. However, it is generally spoken with broken grammar and an accent by the average person. The best speakers are usually those who's parents had enough money to send them to a private school where they start teaching them French around the age of four. The same goes for MSA. Moroccan Colloquial Arabic is to Modern Standard as Latin is to Spanish. Many words are different, some words are the same but have different meanings. As a result, not everyone here is able to communicate as easily in MSA as one might think.

Of course, this explanation doesn't nearly capture the complexities or the intricacies of language in Morocco. A history of colonialism and the spread of religion are responsible for my current frustration, along with countless other factors.

To make matters worse, I spoke with my host dad about my fear of not being able to leave my French behind and focus all of my energy on acquiring the two new languages I am trying to learn during my stay here. As a result, Omar was kind enough to tell me that in order to help me he will only speak to me in Arabic (either form) unless I have a real problem understanding.

After this decision was reached he said something in Arabic. I stared at him for a good two minutes while he repeated it again, and again. Then he told me in French that "he's counting on me" to make the effort. I'm am off to a fantastic start.

Travelling for Blog's Sake

2011-09-26T08:00:00.000Z

Joy and rapture! After two of the longest weeks I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing in my lifetime, I have finally finished my intensive Moroccan Arabic course. This means that to date I have had 50 hours of class in around 15 days, give or take. It was awful. I would like to tell you that this means I have achieved a respectable level of proficiency in this language. Sadly, this is not the case. I cannot tell you the words for "I am hungry" or "Where is the bathroom," BUT if you ask me, I can look them up in my notebook and subsequently mispronounce them for you.

This past week-end we took a group trip to a small town that is known by the locals and tourists as Asilah. It was probably one of the most beautiful cities I've seen to date. Its old city, where our group spent the majority of its day trip was postcard picturesque with a little dash of cute, though I'm hesitant to use such a feminine word after living in a patriarchal society for the better part of a month.

A good summary shot of Asilah

Of course, we did other things aside from visiting Asilah. In fact, even before arriving at Asilah in the late morning we stopped by a small fishing town and took some boats out for a bird watching session that can only be described as "lacklustre". That's to say it was the embodiment of what the French call "l'ennui". Apparently the location was an ideal environment for birds because it was a sort of alcove or enclave right on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean and there were sand bars galore paired with lush vegetation. Unfortunately, if you're like me and don't get very excited about looking at birds from extreme distances for two to three hours that could have been spent eating breakfast, then the little excursion wouldn't have done much for you.

However, at the end of our pre-scheduled bird seeing our guides were kind enough to bring us around to a natural sand dune that over looked the alcove and the Atlantic. Now I might be exaggerating just a small bit, but the view was gorgeous. In a Gisele Bundchen kind of way. Maybe even more so. The pictures do not do it justice in any way, though many of them turned out extremely well considering the fact that my camera is gradually falling apart. (I mean that literally. A screw literally fell out into my hand this weekend.) Here's a small taste of the morning, for those of you familiar with Facebook I've dumped a lot more pictures of the weekend on there.

(Here's a link to the photo album.)

The Seaside Town

Climbing the Dune

The Vista

Andrea's another student here that's good at seeming introspective

So that's my most recent weekend here in Morocco. There was an option to continue on to Tangier after this day trip to Asilah. Much to the chagrin of my fellow students, I opted not to go. Well maybe they weren't filled with that much chagrin, but that's what I've been assuming. Either way, there will be plenty of time to travel during the multitude weekends I have ahead of me here. There's even talk of taking a long weekend and trekking through the neighboring mountains of Marrakech this upcoming weekend, which I am profoundly considering.

What's that? Oh, you're wondering why I completely neglected my opening haiku? Well, as a matter of fact, I have neither neglected it nor forgotten it. I merely saved it until the end as a way of thanking you (or punishing you, I'm concerned about the quality of my Japanese-style poetry). So here you are. Please to enjoy:

My host-mom now makes

Morning black coffee for me

I am whole again

After staring at it for a while, I am again inclined to reconsider using haikus as my gimmick of choice. My previously mentioned plan of Google searching possible ways to distinguish my internet writing turned out fruitless. Fear not. I will come up with a better plan. But until then, thank you for lending me and my adventures your time.

'Carpe Weekum'

2011-09-20T08:00:00.000Z

After reading many of my fellow colleagues' travel blogs I have come to the conclusion that we are all unknowingly very similar, some would say near carbon copies. Thus, I have taken it upon myself to blaze new trails and explore unknown corners of the blogosphere. "But how do you plan to do this when the format doesn't lend itself to divergence?" you might ask. Well, it's simple. I have decided to start out the next few blogs with a haiku. If blatant gimmicks don't set me apart from the multitudes of American students that study abroad every year, then I'm not sure anything can.

Haikus are hard-ish

But I needed a gimmick

I apologize

After some thought, I have decided that maybe an opening haiku is not the most effective way to distinguish my blog. I'll think on it some more and hopefully come up with something dazzling that will assure you, my valued reader, that your time here with me has not been ill spent. Don't worry it will come to me, and it will be amazing and original and totally not something that I decided on after spending fifteen minutes Google searching the phrase "how to set my blog apart from the rest," but I digress.

A lot has transpired since my last posting. I have successfully completed half of my two week intensive language course, selected my classes, and visited Casablanca over the weekend. I am currently experience the kind of fatigue that is only possible when every aspect of your being has been stressed. It is corporal, it is mental and it is emotional. And it sucks. I am attempted to attribute the majority of the blame to the language courses, but that wouldn't be accurate. Every aspect of my current life in Morocco is fatiguing and stressful to one degree or another. Especially my recent trip to Casablanca, which I'll be sure to explain in greater detail towards the end of this post.

A small taste of my trip to Casablanca

Weekend excursions not withstanding, there are still plenty of things here that make life complicated. I'm slowly learning how to navigate this city's public transportation system, but so far every time I take the bus I have to be constantly alert. Even if I achieve the proper amount of alertness there is still an 80 percent chance that I will end up accidentally riding to the end of the route and not realize it until the bus driver gives me a dirty look. Yes, that has happened.

My trip to Casablanca was quite eventful. So much happened in a small 24 hour period that I probably will not be able to fit all of it here. So I've decided to discuss a few highlights that are still fresh in my memory. The excursion started out relatively simply. A group of students took the train from Rabat to Casablanca for a mere 35MDH (approximately 4USD) and headed straight for the Mosque of Hassan II, one of the few mosques in the Muslim world that allows non-Muslims to enter. This is what the picture above is of, and what the following few are of as well. After this little touristy visit the group of 12 set out for a light lunch. The lunch went well, no complaints were heard among any of the students.

However, after the meal the group split. Six of us had decided that we wanted to experience more of Casablanca than just a guided visit and an afternoon snack. Therefore we stayed in Casablanca for the night while the others opted to return home. Little did we know, we were in for a weekend that was anything but relaxing.

After being ripped off by a cab driver, who made us pay double for a three dollar cab ride (I know it doesn't sound that bad, but I've been spoiled by the low cab fair here), we realized that we weren't anywhere near the hotel that we had planned on staying in, and had to walk to the other side of the old medina. Once we found the hotel we asked the price and the owner proceeded to try and over charge us. In case you haven't noticed, this tends to happen to people who look like tourists. With my blonde hair and blue eyes I may as well have a giant dollar sign written on my forehead. Admittedly, that I might still blend in better with that on my forehead if I had brown hair and a tan. So, after deciding against the overpriced hotel we went to the Youth Hostel, which turned out to be full.

Just when we thought all hope was lost, however, we met the sketchiest guardian angel I have ever met. His name was Willy, he overheard us speaking English and told us that he could help us. We weren't very trusting at first, but the others started to be more willing to accept his help after he showed us his American passport and a cab driver's license from San Francisco. I still do not trust him. These two factors change nothing except the fact that we could have been murdered by an American citizen who happened to drive taxis. Despite my misgivings, we followed him to some quaint accommodations. L'hotel la Victoire was a house that had been turned into a hotel. It was small, it was minimally furnished, but it was cheap. After that we had a fairly agreeable adventure exploring our little corner of Casablanca. But once we had all safely returned to our hometown of Rabat, the resounding consensus was we would not be returning to Casablanca any time soon. Here's looking at you, Kid. And just so I don't end it on that predictable note, here are some pictures from the weekend.

A close up of the mosque

The view from the inside of the mosque.

Some of the detail inside the mosque.

The view from our hotel room.

The front of our hotel room.

If you made it all the way to the end of this post, I'd just like to say thank you. I know it wasn't very short, and I may have confused quantity and quality a bit, but nevertheless thanks for taking the time.

The End of The First Week

2011-09-14T08:00:00.000Z

A rather funny thing has been happening to me lately. I'll wake up in the morning, look out my window, and realize that I am in Morocco. It's kind of a funny feeling actually, some days it's a realization that coincides with a sharp prick of panic. While on other more adventurous days it's something that I decide to embrace completely. Of course these two reactions are interchangeable and tend to replace each other multiple times throughout the day.

As of right now I have finished the fifth day of two weeks of intensive Moroccan Arabic, for a total of twenty hours of class time. The language school we (the other study abroad students and I) have been attending is quaint and for all intents and purposes well run. However, this does not change the fact that the human brain was not built to learn a language in two weeks. Everyday I go to school at 2:00pm and everyday I leave school at 6:00pm feeling like my brain is about to start leaking out of my ears.

Arabic School a.k.a. Qalam wa Lawh

Aside from that, there's not much more to report on at the moment. My days here have been filled with countless cups of mint tea, multiple pickup games of soccer, and seemingly endless hours of Moroccan Arabic. My actual classes won't start for another week and half, so it's too early to say what my life will entail as soon as I am able to acquire some semblance of control over its daily aspects. One major accomplishment that I experienced recently was a successful solo trip on Moroccan public transportation, Rabat's number 30 bus to be exact.

Otherwise, life here is still up in the air. There are many things I don't understand and many things I'm not aware of not understanding. But, with time all these things will become clear. The language is tough, and attempting to speak with my host family from time to time in Arabic brings back memories of awkward misunderstandings and half understood instructions from my exchange in France. At the outset of my time here, it seems nearly impossible to achieve fluency in Arabic. Hopefully time will change this, but until then thanks for lending me yours.

The beautiful vista from my home-stay's balcony

First, Second, and Third Impressions

2011-09-08T08:00:00.000Z

A significant amount has transpired since last I wrote. So much in fact, that I will most likely have to omit several things in order to keep this post at a moderate length. I arrived in Rabat, Morocco the day before yesterday at 2:00am. Our group checked in at an Ibis hotel were we spent two nights during our general orientation.

After sleeping for approximately 4 or 5 hours the day of my arrival, I woke up bright and early for a full day of sight seeing. We were given a crash course on Rabat and its environs, which included ancient roman ruins and a section of Rabat that some people refer to as the "Greece of Morocco". As a result, I now have upwards of 100 hundred pictures to sort through. I'll of course be sharing some of my favorites with you here on this blog. Like this one for example:

A bit of some ancient ruins.

And of course I also have some amazing, albeit amateur, photos of the city itself. Like this view from my apartment's common room window. I'll of course be discussing my living accommodations later in this post.

So what do I have to say about Morocco so far? Well it's hard to put into words exactly. It's simultaneously foreign and familiar. Many people told me before going that it's like stepping into another world, so maybe I expected drastic changes that would discombobulate me and catch me off guard. Maybe this preconception has lessened the shock of a non-Western culture, or maybe I just haven't been here long enough to fully encounter this other-worldliness that I've heard so much about.

It is a very beautiful country from the tiny bits I've had the opportunity to see thus far. I anticipate that there are many more beautiful things in store. But as I was saying, it has an air of similarity masked by a feeling of difference and I haven't quite been able to figure out why this is. Perhaps Morocco's colonial history has left an indelible mark on culture and country and my previous experiences in Europe and Israel are shaping my perception of this one? It's far too early to say. You might be thinking that I'm just blowing smoke, or full of hot air, but there is certainly more to Morocco than I had expected. This picture might help explain the point I'm trying to make:

Moroccan stop sign.

Regardless of my first impressions, things seem to be going quite well. Yesterday I met my host family and the extend family. I am living in a 5th floor apartment with the Ammor family, I have a host father, mother, and three host siblings. Family is a very important part of Moroccan life, and not just nuclear family, but extended family and extended extended family. I am living with the Ammor family, but I get the impression that I will be spending a significant amount of time in the house of their relatives as well.

This early into my exchange my French has proven to be invaluable, almost every Moroccan you meet speaks French and is eager to use it with you. In fact in Morocco's local dialect of Arabic they often use French words at their leisure. So moving in with the family has been a lot easier thanks than it might have been had I not been able to communicate effectively. Something that has already begun to fascinate me is what is commonly referred to as a "cold switch". This is an instance that occurs often during conversation in a bilingual culture such as Morocco, and you can hear it just by turning on the radio. In essence a "cold switch" is when a speaker changes from French to Arabic, or vice versa, at random during a conversation. No one can tell you why they change, or if it was necessary, but they do it quite often.

So, for the moment I am using solely French with my host family and the others that I talk to. However, I may be regretting this fact during my studies of Arabic. I will have to be careful to avoid using my French as a crutch, if I am to achieve some sort of proficiency during my time here. I think my goal for this year will to be capable of "cold switching". But as my host father, Omar, informed me yesterday, in his experience with students in this program (his family has hosted 5 or 6) the ones who speak French are less apt to become fluent in Arabic because of the facility that the safe "fall back" of the French language affords them in this country. So I will have to ensure that I learn Arabic rather than polish up my French, and it will most likely prove frustrating. However, I am more capable of overcoming this obstacle, and it's nice to be understood in the meantime.

The common room of my home-stay family's apartment.

In a few short hours I will be attending my first session of my intensive Arabic classes, 4 hours a day for the next two weeks. Hopefully, this crash course will give me a sturdy enough foundation in the language that I can reduce my use of French and experience Arabic in all the awkward misunderstood miming that comes with being a novice in a new language.

Pre-Departure Anxiety

2011-09-04T08:00:00.000Z

As is usually the case before embarking on a journey that will span the better part of 8 months, I put off packing until the last possible second. Due in part to a nervous apprehension that takes hold of me the day before I travel, and inexplicably well developed procrastination tendencies, I have managed to be almost close to thinking I'm done packing. It is 12:30am of the day I am set to depart. Having done this before, I can safely assume that I will remember that I forgot something as I near the end of my 2 1/2 hour drive to the airport.

I snapped a quick photo during the process to help illustrate what exactly goes into it, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. My life, more or less, for the next academic year will be contained in one 50lb suitcase (see below) and two smaller carry-on bags. It's a very unusual thing to be able to fit a year of your life into a space small enough to facilitate easy transportation.

So there you have it. If all goes well, the next time I update this blog it will be from the capital city of Morocco.

An incredibly important update!

2011-08-24T08:00:00.000Z

For those of you who still receive updates from this blog and are still interested in hearing about my global travels, I have moved to Blogger! I just like the format a lot more and I think it will be much easier to deal with while abroad.

So if you'd like to hear all about my escapades in Morocco this upcoming academic year follow the link:
Josh's Many Travels << 👈🏼 this link will break if blogger ever goes down >>

Neo-Liberal Masochism

2011-08-23T08:00:00.000Z

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am at it again. I have once again chosen to leave the comfortable confines of my culture behind and explore the world. Morocco to be specific. Unfortunately, this post is a bit premature. I am still of course in the United States, and will be staying in my quaint hometown until 4:00pm on the 4th of September. So for those of you keeping track, that means I still have 11 days and 20 hours left to wander the old streets of Lena. This wandering may or may not include a bit of marauding. I haven't decided one way or the other.

However, these remaining days will most likely be devoted to business and more business. This is not due to the fact that I have a lot to get in order before I leave, but rather because everyone else is already back at the daily grind or on their own studying abroad trip. Which in fact brings me to the reason I decided to prematurely post on my travels. I just said goodbye to a very dear friend of mine, and while I am overly enthused about both of our travels I can't help remembering how I felt right before I left for France. There is a sense of excitement, of course, but it is also coupled with an overwhelming feeling of anxiety. The inkling that I am on the verge of an unexplored abyss with my foot hanging over the edge, about to be pushed over. Of course, that's what I signed up for, and by no means am I complaining. The unknown is always frightening, and leaving home for a year to study and grow free from the assumed culture of your home country is one of the most mysterious things I have ever experienced. I know that this upcoming year will change me in ways that I could never anticipate. In fact I would be disappointed if it didn't. But again, I am dangling over the precipice of a cliff. A cliff of my choosing. My only hope is that I remain true to who I am, while allowing my eyes to see past the perspective of my culture and experience a part of the world through it's culture and language.

That being said, I am traveling to Morocco. And this will be my first direct contact with a non-Western culture. This abyss is even greater than the one I jumped into when I traveled to Moulins, France. I haven't the slightest idea what awaits me once I get there. In the days leading up to my departure anxiety threatens to overwhelm me, and it's stronger than I've felt in a long time. My circumstances have changed and I'm worried about how this trip will affect me. They say ignorance is bliss, and as far as this trip is concerned I must be the most blissful person around. My hope is that I'll make the most of it, and see Morocco through the eyes of its people. I'll be sure to keep all who care to read up to date as to the fruition of that hope.

Until then, thanks for taking the time.

Europe has been Conquered.

2009-04-18T08:00:00.000Z

Greeting fellow readers!
I know that I've gotten into the really bad habit of writing only about once a month...and I'm sorry I know that there must be certain people who bight their fingernails with anxiety waiting for my posts. (Okay, maybe not but I enjoy the thought of people worrying about me enough to destroy their fingernails.)

So, to fill everyone in. I just got back from a trip which allowed me to be in a total of six countries in 12 days. After doing the mileage math and such you should be able to understand why I'm feeling pretty half dead on the day after my return. So please excuse any serious spelling errors or illogical sentence structures. Also, to add to my tiresome journey, I decided to change families the weekend after getting back. That's right I'm currently with my new fam' and I'm really bonding with them while in Zombie mode. I like them alot though, they let me sleep as much as I want...maybe the key to that is just looking like crap while you're awake.

So anyway, to summarize the trip: France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Monaco, and Switzerland. It was an amazing/once in a lifetime experience that'll never forget. Especially since Altzheimer's isn't a part of my family's medical history. And as I'm coming to the end of this incredible year I just can't believe it's gone by so fast...I mean, already my family is coming to visit me in less than two months! (I'm completely unprepared by the way.) And if these last two weeks have taught me anything it's that my family is going to need a vacation a bit more relaxing than the one I just had. So until next time (next month considering the recent pattern) Thanks for reading and

À bientôt!

Munich
Germany is tight!

You won't see that many consonants in any other language.

Venice
Touristy, but fun.

Monaco
Amazing.

I've been told I don't write enough.

2009-03-26T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Auvergne » Moulins

So...Looking at my most recent entry before this one and realizing that it's been about 36 days since the last time I've blogged, is probably not a good thing. But I'll remain optimistic, at least it wasn't 37 days! As you may have guessed, a lot can happen in a 36 day long period. Just to give all of you an idea, I'll list everything I've done since getting back from España (Spain).

First thing I did was go back to school and take what the french call the "Bac Blanc" (pronounced "Bak Blawn" héhé.) The best american comparison I can think of is a practice ACT/SAT. And I'm sure all of you will be shocked to hear that I took the entire thing in FRENCH! The only results worth hearing about are the ones I got on the french part of the test...mostly because I didn't answer a lot of questions on the other sections. Anways on the french part I got a 13 out of 20, which in France is pretty dang good. To put it in perspective I got the second highest grade in my class of 16 year old compatriotes.

After that delightful week I hopped onto a ferry and headed towards Liverpool England, where I spent a week perfecting my fake Liverpool english accent. (I tried it out on some Australians, they told me it was pretty good, which says a lot because they are decended from the English criminal justice system!)

From there I did several other things like going to the departmental final with my rugby team and getting our butts kicked by some giant sized woodsmen, I had a meeting with all of the other exchange students in France in Toulouse, which was extremely hyped up and then ended up being a tiny bit of a let down, but it's not grave, the point is I got to see friends and talk english and stuff.

Then, to finish up this 36 day summary, I was visited by my two favorite New York City living cousins. Yes Amy and Jacob did end up finding my almost unfindable town and they even ate dinner with my host family and Jacob tried to talk french a little bit and was extremely formal with my 6 year old host brother! It was great time and the day after we got to go see almost all of my little departement. Which including drinking "healthy fizzy water" from a natural spring, which ended up burning Jacob's face.

So there you have it. Every major event from the last 36 days. I'll be changing host families soon and I'm confidant that I'll be able to update this blog on a much more regular basis...as long as I feel like it.
Merci d'avoir tout lu!

Rugby Team

Let's Just Say I Was Right About Spain.

2009-02-17T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » Spain » Catalonia » Barcelona

Mon Voyage En Espange.

So, I dated this entry as the day before the end of the trip. Actually it's the day after the end of the trip, but just pretend that this a cool summing up on the last day kind of entry. So, to make a long story short, Spain was incredible. I saw and did things that I would never have imagined a year ago, I made friends that I'll never forget, & of course, I put my feet in the Med. Sea once again. I'm almost wish that I had had a horrible time because now I'm going to be insanley depressed when I have to go back to french school, and I don't get to see any of the people I met ever again...

...Anyway, I'll leave you all with a bit of wisdom that me and my Mexican roomate learned while in Spain...never try to draw on the face of someone from Finland while he's sleeping. Because you might end up getting cursed out in finnish and have markers thrown at you...Okay, until next time, thanks for reading.

Roman Arena in France.
'twas cool

On the beach.
Representing the U.S. of A.

Greatest Church Ever!
'nuff said.

Dahli Museum
This was also cool.

España!

2009-02-04T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Auvergne » Moulins

So, I decided it would probably be going idea to update everybody on what's been going on here before I leave for my trip on vacation. And since I discovered the the cybercafé only cost 1.50€ with my "youth pass", I told myself go for it. So yes, this upcoming mondya I'm leaving for the first of two trips in Europe. This one lasts from February 9th to Febraury 16th (If I remember correctly). I'll start out in Paris, go to Dijon & Lyon, and then it's off to Spain! Yes Spain, the magical country where the sun always shines and the cigarettes are half as expensive. Among other things I'll be visting the museums of Picasso & Salvador Dahli. I'm so excited I can barely contain my enthusiasm (whether I can spell it or not). So yes, I hope to have a great time and upon my return I will definetely blog, who knows maybe I'll blog from Spain herself, who knows how it'll go. Of course like any exciting adventure, this trip comes with a down side. Because my host family is going skiing in the alps at almost the exact same length of time as my trip, I will not be going skiing in the Alps...THE ALPS. But I'm not bitter...Also because they leave two days befoe my train to Paris departs I'll be spending two days with my third family this week-end. Hopefully, I'll get to know them a little better before I move in with them in March/April. But yeah, that's my life for the next two weeks. Thanks for reading.

This Blog Cost Me 3.

2009-01-21T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Auvergne » Moulins

So, a lot of things have changed since my last update...a month ago...yeah, sorry Anita, my mom told me all about what I was putting you through. But yeah aside from the national news that happened yesterday, a lot more important things have happened in my personal life. After a rough ending with my first host family, I am now living comfortably with my seconde family accross the street...yeah, big changes. But one things that's changed is my computer situation...and that's why I'm blogging from this awesome cyber cafe I discovered, so I hope you enjoy this blog, it's my most expensive one yet. I've also seen many things whilst visiting France a bit with my new host family. In fact I saw the Eiffel Tower for the first time in my life the day after Christmas. (If you'll direct your attention to the photo). But yeah, I'm trying to be quick so that I don't spend even more money, so just know that I'm safe and doing well, in less than 15 days I'll be on my first of two bus trips, (in Spain). But yeah, Thanks for reading. I'll try to start updating more often.

I came, I saw, I concered.

A Right of Passage

2008-12-10T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Burgundy » Baune

Alors, pour commencer je vais parler en française, mais vous n'inquetez pas je vais écrire en anglais aussi...en fait je crois que il n'y a que de deux ou trois personnes qui peut comprendre ce que je suis en train d'écrire...bon...ça suffit je vais continuer en anglais, même si j'aime bien d'écrire en français de temps en temps...et pour ceux qu'a compris: ne dites personne que j'ai fait beaucoup des fauts.

So today, I'm writing for an incredibly important reason. Wine. Yes that's right, and not just any wine, today I visited one of the most respected one cellars in all of France. If there are any wine experts reading right now get ready for a huge name drop. Here it comes: "Bouchard Père & Fils". I know right? For those who have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about let me explain in terms that helped me understand. For starters this family of wine has been around since 1731. That's 45 years before my country officially existed!

The Family Crest.
There's actually a lot of symbolism behind this...if I understood correctly.

Today I saw bottles of wine that were more than 150 years old! I didn't even think that was possible. I think it goes without saying that if your wine company has been around for more than 250 years, you're doing something right. What's even better is I'm now an advanced expert in the ways of wine tasting and and such. In fact I'm going to do something special and list all the wines that were swished around in my mouth aujourd'hui. They go something like this:

Bourgogne Rouge les Coteaux des Moines 2007
Monthélie 2005
Beaune du Château Rouge Premier Cru 2006
Volnay Caillerets Ancienne Cuvée Carnot 2004
Nuits Saint-Georges Les Cailles 2004

And that's only the reds! I also tasted 5 other whites, as well as three additional wines with lunch. Thank you, I'm practically french now it's true. If there are some of you out there who didn't understand anything at all while reading this post, don't worry all it takes is a year or more in France to only start to understand the importance of wine in french culture. Thanks for reading, and I don't want any comments about how I've become an elitist since I've left home...

It was cold and crappy, and this is also "le vigne de l'enfant Jésus" if I'm not mistaken...

The tour guide told me that they sell happiness in a bottle...
...therefore you must have to pay more to be extra happy.

Semi-Big News

2008-12-07T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Auvergne » Moulins

So this past week-end was exceptionel. In fact a little bit more than exceptionel. Saturday morning at the early hour of 9:30 I departed from the tranquility of my host home and set out on a fantastical voyage with a "hyper cool" lady from my rotary. With her and her family I celebrated christlmas 19 days early... and whew it was quite a time (Elizabeth, only you will ever know why ;-]). At the christmas lunch that I spent with this delightful family (which took place from 1 to 4 or 5 in the afternoon, and no that is not a typo) I had the distinct honor of service the champagne that we had with our dessert. Seeing as I'm not habituated to this the family decided it was a perfect picture oportuninty(?). Hence the picture, ta-da! In case anybody wants to question my 4Ds integrity I will say this: champagne has less alcohol than vodka therefore, it's not the worst thing I could do.

I'm fairly certain that no "faux pas" where commited during the making of this photo.

After the celebrations, my night was not even close to over. Through a series of connections that is so complicated I won't even try to explain, I ended up going to a "soirée" that the Lyon rotary district was having with it's students. I met a lot of cool students who feel almost exactly the same way about France as I do at the moment and I got to speak a ton of english, which is always good. And so, after this wonderful week's end during which I even visited Lyon a little bit, I am know out of my valley and onto a hill. (Symbolism or maybe a metaphor...deep)

I should also mention that I'm changing host families in 13 days! Aïe! But don't worry I'm only moving across the street and my address is only changing by one number, in fact I can see my next house from my bedroom window. So until "la prochaine fois"...good-bye and thanks for reading.

'Francs-giving'

2008-11-29T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Auvergne

Long time no update, so I decided to log in and fill in the gaps a bit. You'll have to excuse an spelling or gramatical errors that show up in my blogs from this point on, the longer I'm emerged in the French language the more I forget how to spell in my first. So, here's what's been happening since last I posted. I think it was right after my autumn vacation, so I'll take it from there. Since then there has been almost nothing going on here in my corner of the world. The next major holiday isn't until Christmas (Nöel) and I've basically just been heading to the daily grind everyday since vacation ended. Yesterday, in honor of our american roots the four americans at our school (myself included) threw a thanksgiving party and invited a bunch of our friends of french origin (hopefully the meaning of the title has now been made clear to those who didn't not understand it at first). I think it went pretty well, I'm not sure if we really taught our our friends of french origin anything about thanksgiving, but we had a good time regardless.

The highlight of "Francs-giving" consisted of the americans sitting around a table talking in english...

Vacation!

2008-11-09T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Auvergne » Moulins

So, realizing that a month is probably way to long to wait for the next update of my blog I decided to only wait 23 days. No need to thank me, I feel obligated. So last week during my fall vacation my family went to a well known European tourist trap named 'Center Parc'. It was a really great time, and between fighting boughts of homesickness (which always seem to come when you don't have work to focus on), having the awesome black paint job wash of my camera, and it snowing and raining, I manged to actually have a little bit of fun. That's right I'm very optimistic. Once we got back from vacation we went to our monthly rotary dinner where I had the distinct honor of meeting my district's governor, and that's what the other picture is.

What the crap! It wasn't even November when I took this!

And the district governor officially has a Galena Rotary Banner!

And there was also one other thing I wanted to mention. My two month anniversary was the 27th of October, and to commerate that I wanted to give a special gift to all my readers. My gift is a basic, very basic, understanding of the french language. So in order to do that I've researched 3 words that are exactly the same in french and english. They are:

ok
cool
yoga

All of you are now ready to be tourists in France.

Rugby!!

2008-10-16T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Auvergne » Vichy

So, big news...okay, not that big, but important none the less. Yesterday afternoon, I participated in my first official Rugby match, and then my second and third as well. My team travelled all the way to Vichy to participate in a four team tournament...which we took third in. Yes, we only won one of our three games...but it's not the end of the world. It was a good time, and it was even more fun singing "We are the Champions" in with a french team in our locker room after our only win. (Yes, even in France everyone knows the words to at least one Queen song.) I'm happy to say that I even scored a try! (It's like a touchdown but not.) Sorry that I don't have any pictures to post with this, but I didn't think to bring my camera...and even if I did I probably wouldn't have been able to take any pictures while I was playing...So thanks for reading, and remember, Rugby is a real man's sport!

Oui...Buf.

2008-10-12T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Auvergne » Moulins

So I was sitting at home bored today when an amazing concept donned on me, I don't need pictures or important news to be able to update my blog. So, I'll just fill you in on some of the things that've been going on recently. This past week was pretty uneventful. It pains me to say this, but I've actually fallen into a bit of a routine with school and my family and what-not. Me and some of my classmates had a bit of a going away party for two of the Germans who where finishing up a school organized exchange. (I had to resist the urge to tell them that 1 and a half months doesn't even compare to my 10 and a half.) Our party consisted of the two germans and six other students going to a fancy Italian restaurant and eating pizza. I have to say that the Italian restaurants in France are probably more authentic than the ones in the States (distance changes everything).

On Saturday, I was invited to lunch and two museum visits by a memeber of my rotary club. Which, I accepted without hesitation (because my mom says I'm not allowed to say no to those kinds of things). It was a good time, I was able to meet another exchange student from Lyon's district, an exchange from Brasil. And I was surprised when I first met her and she spoke better english than some of my friends back in the States. After a very cultured Saturday, I came back home at 9:30 without any problems. Then on Sunday, today if you found this update quickly, I watched my host brother's basketball team win its third game in a row.

So, if you're still reading then you truly are formidable. I guess the point of this update was just to show that I'm not riding any High-highs or Low-lows. For the moment, things are just...going. So, thanks for reading this entry with out any real point, and I hope that the next time I post I have some real news.

P.S.
I'd like to wish my mom a very happy 28th anniversary of her 20th birthday. And also send congratulations to my new "cousin-in-law" Amy. Wish I could've been there for both.

I will soon be very, very fat.

2008-10-03T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Auvergne » Moulins

If I haven't previously mentioned, I've been living in a restaurant for the last one month and six days. In a tribute to my friend the chef, this week I decided to put up some pictures of the fine cuisine I've enjoyed recently. I know it's a bit odd to take pictures of food before you eat it, but look at the pictures and you'll understand. Before you get mad and tell me it's not fair that I'm eating like this while there are starving college students living off "Ramen", you need to realize that this a cruscial part of my cultural experience. How can I truly experience France without eating some of the best dishes France has to offer?

This tasted pretty good...it was completely devoured five minutes after this picture was taken.

Me and the chef are pretty tight.

Small but tasty.

Technically I didn't have three square meals this day...

Other things that've been going on this week include my first day of Rugby practice, my first European Doctors exam, and generally just bumming around. Rugby was fun, I have a feeling my knees will be in a constant state of "scrapped-up-ness" until the end of the season. I am enjoying the work ethic though, in France for most school sports the team only meets once a week for practice. It's awesome, I recommend it for all sporting organizations all over the world. I'm also very excited because at the end of this month I will experience my first break from school from October 24th to November 6th...and my family will be taking a trip to Centre Parc (if you're desperate to know what that is I recommend googling it), it should be very fun. So until next post, thanks for reading.

One Month Strong.

2008-09-26T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Auvergne » Moulins

So today, on the eve of my one month anniversary of being in France, I've decided to do something special. Okay, it's not that special. Basically, I'm just going to share some of my newly acquired wisdom with you. All of what follows has been, of course, learned during my last 30 days in France. If you are going to be staying in a foreign country for an extended period of time in the near future I recommend you pay close attention.

The majority of people outside of america believe that almost all of the United States' population is made up of overweight individuals, because of our strict McDonald's diet. (there are overweight people in every country by the way.)
If your host father starts calling you "Jo Jo", stop him immediatley or you will remain "Jo Jo" for the next four months of your stay in his house.
When you don't know for certain what you are eating ask either before or after eating it. NEVER DURING! Because you might find out that you currently have a mouthful of duck liver...
Required spanish classes will only give you a headache and muddle your french.

That's all I've got at the moment. But remember I've only been hear one month, if I continue to learn four a month, that's fourty-four by the time I come home! So thanks for reading, and remember, duck liver actually isn't that bad before you know what it is.

Chez Moi. My room is the second window from the right on the very top.

Périgueux

2008-09-16T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Auvergne » Moulins

l'eglise (that's french for church)

So, this past weekend I was in Périgueux, France. I know I know, that's pretty awesome. I was there for my first district Rotary meeting in France. For those of you who don't know what that is I recommend you ask around until someone gives you a believable answer, because it would take far too long for me to explain in writing. I had a great time meeting all of the students who are in my area this year, I met other students from: Finland, Canada, Australia, Thialand, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, and probably some other places that I can't remember off the top of my head. It was a great time and I managed to get a picture of the group, which you can see below. But another cool thing about this weekend was the actual town of Périgueux. Especially a unique church that just so happened to be near the hotel I stayed in. What makes this church unique (I'm told) are the domes on the ceiling. So, that is why I've also put up a picture of that church. Okay, that's all I've got for now. Thanks for reading.

P.S. (If you think the pictures too small you can click on it to make it a bit bigger.)

I'm on the far left in the cool blazer.

Palavas-les-Flots

2008-09-10T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Centre

I promised pictures of my trip to the Mediterranean and I wasn't joking. Here they are. I know it's only four pictures but look at it this way, it's better than three. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to upload these because this computer hates american cameras, but thankfully that semester of computer classes actually turned out to be usefull after all!

Don't worry fearful parents, all my pictures are nudity free!

These last to weeks have been hectic because I got my first taste of French school...I do not recommend it for anyone, ever. I'm not sure how often I'll be able to write in the coming days because tomorrow my host family re-opens their restaurant, and it's going to be very busy around the house until about...december when I move in with my second family. I'm sure that everyone would like to see where I've been living recently so I'll see if I can take some pictures, or at least describe it very vividly in my next post. Last weekend I got to travel out to Montluçon and meet my host mother's parents and brothers it was very exciting to see more of France, the more I see of this country the more I like it. Thanks for reading.

You can't see our apartment, it's covered by the restaurant...sorry.

I totally crossed off a life goal after this picture.

There were these cool rocks you could walk out to, so, of course, we did.

A quick update.

2008-09-02T08:00:00.000Z

Europe » France » Burgundy

So, a wierd thing happened about a week ago... I got off a plane, and everyone was speaking french. Luckily, I made it through customs easily and met my family without any problems. We then proceeded to get into a much smaller mini-van than I am used to and travel for almost nine hours to Palavas, a beach near Montpellier. It was very fun and I will put pictures up soon. After four days in Palavas, we travelled four hours back to Moulins, where I am now. I started school today, and it was very different from american school (mostly because it was in french...) But now it is late and I'm very tired from typing on a very different keyboard than I'm used to, so until next time, au revoir.

Because Scott Said To.

2008-08-26T08:00:00.000Z

North America » United States » Illinois » Chicago

So I'm sitting in my living room for the last time in the next 11 months. Of course I'm participating in a timeless American past time...watching the movie "Dodgeball". Of course, a lot of emotions are going through my mind at the moment; anxiety, fear, extreme giddiness (mostly due to Dodgeball), and of course there's that extreme nagging thought of "what did I get myself into?". The only thing left for me to do is roll with the punches, so to speak.

What did I get myself into?

Preface

2008-08-17T08:00:00.000Z

So, this is where my story begins

I haven't yet left for France, and the anticipation is killing me. But like the tenacious character I am, I am some how finding it in me to soldier on. This will obviously be the first of many blogs (as long as I can remember my password), and hopefully this will make it easier for me to keep anybody and everybody informed on everything I get myself into during this upcoming year. I have everything in order, and I'll be leaving the 26th of August. My first host family seems nice judging from the few e-mails we've exchanged, and my french still remains remedial. I can't wait to see what this year has in store for me.