design: mindful and simple

there is something humbling, something enlightening, something troubling about being out of your mundane experience and being in someone(s) else's everyday life.  one can find thrill and enjoyment in a thing so simple as a public wash basin.

ode to the sign wiggler

o gentle sign wiggler.
how you wear your ipod with signature white ear buds and stare at the passing traffic.
holding at chest-height a large paperboard rectangle with words about "blowout sale" or "50% off!"
and then, you wiggle it.

you grab my attention with your odd placement on the side of the roadway.
your forlorn look, eyes gazing over the top of cars and trucks whizzing by.
again, you gently wiggle.

i wonder, as i bicycle--a bit too closely--by,
what brought it to this?
do we react to this type of personified advertisement?
or do we just keep going, much like i do, and mutter underbreath,
"poor s.o.b., wiggling that sign is the only thing keeping him/her from freezing."

at the very least, i hope you've got a good "wiggler on the go" mix on that ipod.
by the way, 50% off sale until friday, next left.

i bike a good deal

in the past 5 years, i have cycled over 23,000 miles.

a good portion of which is bike commuting to and from work, and to and from meetings.

my trusty steed, a '98 gary fischer mountain bike, is a chunky beast that can take the daily beatings and still maintain solid time in the finesse shifting needs.

a couple of weeks ago, i starting having some issues unlocking my kryptonite u-lock.

occasionally, this is due to a wee bit of precipitation getting into the tumbler and either freezing in the cold months or corroding the moving parts a tad--therefore needing a shot of oil.

so i oiled and the remedy did not take. humph.

by deductive reasoning, i started to think that the tumbler itself may be broken or dislodged, as i found that if the key were shimmied back and forth while attempting to turn the lock it would take on occasion. perhaps i dropped the lock and it hit the pavement, causing the dislocation of the tumbler, i thought.

i traced my memory and did not recall any such event that was out of the ordinary to cause such a malfunction.

so, i then started to think about the key itself. maybe it was the culprit to the dilemma.

i dunno, upon inspection, it still had teeth and the appearance of a key. it did have a bit of wear, but could this really be the problem?

i located the spare key for the lock and made a comparison...

eeigh! the key was indeed the problem-maker. and the whittling down of this steel served as a small feather of merit in my cycling cap. i love wearing out gear, due to use. a very satisfying feeling.

80s hair bands on pandora

a while back, i mentioned the fuel and joy that pandora provides me with.

well, i've been rocking out on a journey, survivor, def leopard, poision, and other assorted 80s hair bands on my pandora station in recent months. 

for all transparrency, i sported a fashionable mullet in the late 80s/early 90s, a la the guy below.

perhaps i still have a bit of residual phantom mullet that provokes my love for the poppy, cheese rock.

super hike

dave, jen, a, & i hiked mt. grays and mt. torreys.

 

we set foot on the trail at about 8:30am. the trailhead sits at right around 11,000 ft above sea level. meandering through a set of trees, right at the peak of treeline, then fields of shrubs, alpine flowers, babbling mountain streams, and up up up. around 13,000 feet life begins to peter out and the landscape turns to boulders and shards of different rocks.

the air becomes so thin and the steep climb warrents taking a breather about once every 10 minutes of climbing. the pit stops allowed for absorbing the breathtaking views. at about noon-thirty, we reached the summit of grays and soaked it in, munching on peanut butter and banana sandwiches before heading down the valley and starting up to peak torreys.

it took about another hour to get to the top of the second 14er of the day. torreys has a fantastic view as well. then comes the hike back down.

where the traverse up was a muscle and lung challenge, the walk back down is a bit of a controlled fall and you can feel it most in your joints.

the landscape gently erupts in a reverse order from which it had disappeared just a few hours before. tiny, ground-hugging mosses and small flowers get larger the further you go down. it as if they grow before your eyes and the groves get thicker and thicker, until they become fields of beauty amongst the rocks, then the streams got wider and the shrubs stood taller. into the thicket of trees and back to the trailhead, arriving back at about 4:30pm.

exhilarating, satisfying, joy.

month lapse

may 2009 will remain in history as an official month of blog silence. i wish that i could say that it was in protest for thus-and-such or in respect of this-and-that, but the first mute cycle of the moon since the inception of this vehicle for public display has no such attributes.

alas, summer is nearly here and time continues to fly. brief recap of the elapsed time: work, work, work, md & s in for visit, j rossi in for visit, ma & pa w. in for visit, jason & justin in for visit.

the coming weeks hold a few weekend get-aways with dave & jen--both camping trips: one to the south; one to the west, backcountry-style. should be a grand time on both respective trips. the trip south also holds a hot spring in the cards. giddyup.

slippers

i like to wear house slippers. it was a commonplace practice around my house as a kid, but fell out of standard practice after moving out. a couple of years back, i rekindled the love for cushy foot comfort and procured a pair of indoor footware on sale after the winter season.

i usually stow my slippers once spring comes and there is always a bit of surprise when i re-discover them when the seasons begin to change for the cooler each fall.

i park my slippers by the door, awaiting the retreat from work each day. at night, i unsheathe my feet and leave the cushy pair resting at the foot of the bed. each morning, sliding my sleepy feet back into the friendly treads with a soothing sensation washing over me through the seemingly mundane experience.

thank you, dear slippers, for the joy you bring.

goto-shi, nagasaki, japan looking for change?

in '02-'03, a. and i lived in goto-shi, japan. a beautiful, rural archipelago located in southern japan, situated a 4-hour ferry ride from the mainland and close to south korea.

the two of us made up 25% of the foreign population.

as one can imagine, this experience was very revealing, humbling, awe-inspiring, and life-changing.

our apartment was located 1/4 mile from the modest downtown of a city of 25,000. it was a 10-minute bike ride to the west to hit the green mountains and a 10-minute bike ride to the southeast to a secluded sandy beach for a sea of japan reprieve.

the island we lived on, goto-jima, also hosted ironman japanif you are training and looking for a good challenge, i'd highly suggest it.

catching up on some of their current local happenings, i couldn't help but notice a similarity in their city flag to another iconographic symbol we have come to know...



hmmm...

condolences, ricardo

kaaaahnnnn!

patchouliland

after a 4-day reprieve back in ol' b'more, we're back on the bus to mork & mindy-ville. we headed back east for a wedding, of which we enjoyed last night. spent some good quality time with the fam and caught up with a battery of old friends via vegan eats, coffee, & a wee bit of booze.

it perplexes me, the mental playground of revisiting shadows of your past.

stepping in the footsteps of your yesterday, reflecting on your own evolutionary path. in several respects, it is fascinating to feel the brunt of this confounding time-space derailment.

it had been well over a calendar year since returning to md. after a few hours, the synapses began to fire in the correct order, yet i stood beside myself in awe of how we are so easily swayed by life experiences to dictate our reality.

in this trip, i heard echoes of remembrances--so-and-so were robbed yesterday, such-and-such burnt down, this-and-that closed down...yet, these understandings of a reality, not necessarily my own in the current, are what have my mind skipping on the poorly articulated confounding plerplexion leading this post. it is concerning, yet fascinating how we adapt to different situations and accept them as reality--which can be drastic extremes of good and bad. i stumble on a memory of our old neighborhood in b'more occasionally--we were out for a stroll two blocks from our house one friday night. across the street was a cop talking to a guy slumped on a bus stop bench clutching his bleeding left shoulder. turns out he had been stabbed and they were getting a report as the minutes ticked closer to an ambulance arriving. we were curious, yet shrugged the man's injuries off and kept walking to our destination.

sure, what can you really do, you may ask. same city, two of our friends were inside their house watching a dvd. a series of gun shots punctuates their evening from outside of their home, followed by desperate cries for help. after a peek out the window, they go back to watching the movie.

how is it possible we can do this? it is survival, in many ways. evolution and acceptance, with a sprig of apathy and dash of nonchalant desensitization. in the same way I observed and associated spent junkies in my back yard as simply factors of my mundanity, i now see countless strips of bicycle lanes, soy lattes, and wafts of patchouli mildly interrupting my focused thoughts.

irrational emotions

i'm not sure how we wound up there, however i do suppose that it could be called good olde 'surfing the web.'

we were catching up on some news items and then there was a google consultation and after a few random clicks we wound up parousing the phobia list.

it seems after some careful self-diagnosis, that i suffer from phobophobia, mixed with a little hobophobia--that is a phobia of phobias and a fear of becoming a bum on the street. what is your phobia?

vile illness

ugh. the past 36 hours have rendered me incapacitated. the demon began to surface in the midst of a meeting, feeling like a sour stomach from too much coffee. within an hour, i was incapable of focusing on anything but discomfort and pain. i evacuated the workplace and unlocked the front door of our home only moments before the horrible bug inside of me forced most of everything i had in my stomach back out from wince it came.

i floated between an unconscious state of "sleep" and a hyper-conscious run to the vomitorium. i seem to be well on the mend late today, however. the pain has resided and i felt hunger, which was satiated by soup and it stayed where it is supposed to, in the belly. i haven't been this ill since i was a kid.

health care in the u.s.

we finally watched m. moore's 'sicko' last night. in recent years, i had ventured away from listening to his impressions. a bit out of feelings of criticism, a bit out of feelings to put up my blinders and not want to know, and a bit of his focus not relaying to my current general interests.

however, this film about the rogue health care industry in the united states reinvigorated my thirst for knowledge outside of my sphere of topical interests. this exposé on our corrupt system of managed health care reinforced the general echoing burden of fear and feelings of helplessness that we have come to associate with reality in this country.
i can speak for myself, who i don't consider in anyway of possessing solely unique thoughts or feelings by any means--even though i have a acronym'd health care plan via work and my wife is covered under an individual policy that we procured, i have a lingering concern and doubt for the repercussions that would amount if either or both of us had to seek serious care. i have a lack of confidence that the insurance company would pick up the costs of whatever the circumstances warranted. am i alone in having these thoughts looming in the back of my mind?

it is enough to suffer from an ailment or a condition that that render you in need of medical care, but to have to be concerned as to how it will effect you financially seems ludicrous. is this not what health insurance was established to remedy? yes, but it has become a beast of burden as our attention waned and apathy grew away from having a sense of control and say over actions that have been and are being taken. that's where the helplessness comes in.

what can we as individuals do about any of this? action needs to happen from our legislators to propose solutions to this giant problem. we can, as organized individuals, encourage our legislators to focus on these concerns and devise solutions to remedy our health care system that no longer cares about we the people.

lotsa matzah!

enough to stop your bowels for a whole year!

guess what...i'm white

the verdict finally tallied in today, as i reviewed this blog and came to the glaring recognition that these items define me.

sunday morning

i would have to profess that without question, sunday morning is my favorite time of the week. the feel of sunday is calm and reflective, yet a bit anticipatory.

the expressive organic freedom of friday and saturday becomes awash on sunday morning, as you become bound to pay heed to the upcoming workweek. this calmness, is somewhat akin to sitting in a waiting room--it allows you the time to reflect, to wonder, to do what you want (again, within reason), yet you feel the time ticking to the appointment that is coming...monday.

the ideal sunday? snuggling in jammies for a few extra minutes, a dark pot of coffee, messy bed-head for most of the day, a light, productive project (a good hike, baking, watching a film, reading the sunday ny times, walking to the library).

by sunday early evening, however, the day starts to take that familiar tone of routine as the sun sets and dinner pangs echo from the stomach. alas, sunday is, and presumably always will be, my favorite day of the week.

headlines

how many times have we seen headlines like this?
"dozens killed in worst baghdad attack in months"

number one-point-five?

yesterday, i peered into the mirror and fully processed the appearance that i have been sculpting with my razor.

ugh...

ethically perplexed

it was only a matter of time before we reached the point of cloning human embryos in a relatively convenient manner.

it troubles me to a great extent to consider a future where clones are a fact of life. frankly, what troubles me even more than the concept of drones walking amongst us, but rather who determines who gets cloned.

my mind, struggling to grasp this vision, turns to thoughts of star wars and the masses of storm troopers who were to be spawn from replicated clones for military forces. without strict oversight, who is to say that the offspring of cloning could not go this direction? or would we elect to create clones for our world labor force? perhaps we can genetically mutate a cadre of clones to be dependent upon breathing carbon and exhaling oxygen, drinking toxic fluids and expelling pure water, and their skin with neutralizing oils and the innate desire to bathe in a quagmire of chemicals, only to eradicate the toxicity level?

neti fever

one year ago, i was witness to a raging testimonial for this ayurvedic wonder. jmr's 70-year old father exclaimed across the dinner table full of pastas-o-plenty, "my neti pot changed my life!" the resounding image of his crooning full red cheeks echoed in my mind and finally prompted my recurring curiosity to action last weekend as i took the $13 plunge and procured a ceramic pot of my very own. thus far, i would have to say that it is only a mildly invasive journey to bring the inside out, and my sense of smell has definitely been heightened--for at least a good while after purging the sinuses. i'll keep you posted on the continual usage and outcome.