January 2012
1 post
3 tags
Work in Progress: Creating to Destroy
I, along with every other American, saw James Cameron’s Titanic when it first debuted in theaters in 1997. My motivation for doing so wasn’t due to any sort of preoccupation with tragedies, Leonardo DiCaprio, or seminal Hollywood blockbusters. Rather, I went to see Titanic — at the time, the most expensive film ever made — simply to understand what a $200 million film...
November 2011
1 post
Work in Progress: Bibliophilia
Ellwood, Stephen. This Is What It Is Like to Be Like This. Toronto: Art Metropole, 2005.
—
Anyone who knows me well can testify to the fact that I have a bit of a book fetish. Throughout my life, in all the times I’ve had to move, it’s been paper that has made up the large majority of what I own—in both weight and volume. I’ve been willing to part with practically any...
July 2011
1 post
The Merits of Commitment
Alternately: The Trade-offs of Iteration
As a child, my writing utensil of choice was a mechanical pencil. Unlike your standard-issue Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2, these instruments never needed sharpening. Always precise, but beyond that: easily erased. The sloppy errors I made in my math homework, the absent-minded doodles I made on my homeroom desk, the words I wrote in notes to friends but...
June 2011
1 post
A Week-Long Affair. A Lifetime of Love.
It was inevitable, this love affair with you.
I was hanging with my bestie from grad school. We were lounging on her couch, sipping tea and catching up on Life as we are known to do. We had run through the laundry list of updates. Work: check. Friends: check. Family: check. Reading: check. Movies: check. And then, she casually dropped your name, inquiring as to whether I had, by chance,...
February 2011
1 post
Mi Casa Su Casa
As embarrassing as it is to admit, it was an episode of The Partridge Family that I watched as a child (by then long in syndication) that first introduced me to the perils of The Echo Chamber. In This is My Song, the 10-year-old Danny explores his own stirrings as an aspiring songwriter, eager to prove his abilities and save his family from a dry spell of new material. As he drifts off to sleep...
January 2011
1 post
A ♥ Letter from the Present to the Past and Future
Note: I’m not sure whether it’s considered cheating to syndicate your own content, but this was originally published here. I’ve been meaning to revive Long-winded: A Blog for People Who Read for a while now (see Keep Me Honest), so this is my way of alleviating some of the guilt for having broken all three resolutions within the first month. And yes, No. 3 really is easy enough;...
December 2010
1 post
Keep Me Honest: Resolutions for 2011
July 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Au Bon Pain = To The Good Pain?
This past weekend we were out for an afternoon stroll when we stopped into an Au Bon Pain to rehydrate and use the loo. As I sipped my cloyingly sweet lemonade, my eye caught sight of a truly remarkable sign at the register:
My immediate thought was: Wow—someone in Product Merchandising is probably getting fired for this. But once my initial disbelief had subsided, I began to wonder whether ABP...
4 tags
We Interrupt This Regularly Scheduled Program
As my work colleagues all know, prior to my introduction to social media, I used my 23-inch monitor as my primary desktop and my laptop monitor for television. Bad television. For close to three years, I subsisted on a steady diet of reality shows and serial dramas—anything I could watch for free on network sites, Hulu, or Netflix Instant. At one point I realized my consumption was actually...
May 2010
5 posts
2 tags
Free Ticket for Sale
I was having dinner with a couple of friends about a month ago, when they stopped to inquire as to how my Life Experiment was going (more on this soon). Somehow our discussion turned to the discrepancy that frequently occurs between a person’s online and offline personas. Not in the sensationalist, News At Eleven phenomenon of dirty old men masquerading as minors in chat rooms, but more...
4 tags
Twenty-Eight/Six?
When I first moved back to New York after a couple years in San Francisco, I attempted a Life Experiment of another sort. Rather than pursue a staff position in another design studio, I elected to freelance for a while and secured several assignments with generous timelines. For a period of about two to three weeks, I decided to ignore the clock, eating and sleeping only as my body dictated....
3 tags
Webster, I've missed you.
At one point during my childhood, I attempted to read the entirety of my sister’s Merriam-Webster. There was something so affirming about the notion that our vast universe of language could be contained within a single volume, patiently awaiting my discovery. If I remember correctly, I didn’t get terribly far before abandoning my efforts—all of the prefixes, suffixes, and...
2 tags
Uniform as Differentiator
(Many thanks to Ryan for the merit badge inspiration) In high school I used every excuse imaginable to get a free pass out of Phys Ed. While I was hardly athletic, it wasn’t the actual activities that I dreaded (although lacrosse vigorously tested the limits of my hand-eye coordination)—it was the standard issue gold t-shirt and blue gym shorts I was mandated to wear for 53 minutes twice a...
3 tags
Work in Progress: Funny Food
Earlier in the week as I was returning home after a long day, I was annoyed to discover yet another take-out menu that had been stuffed under the door. As I bent down to retrieve it, my eye caught sight of dish Q3 from the Chef’s Specials. Amazing indeed! Taking typographic cues from their original menu designs, I’ve decided to pay homage to some of the more amusing dishes I discover...
April 2010
12 posts
3 tags
The Stupidity of Crowds
We spent this past weekend in South Beach, a place I like to visit for its Otherness—its contrast to my Typical Everyday in New York. Replace gummed-up concrete with powdery sand, blaring sirens with the dry rustling of palm trees, tall soy lattes with piña coladas. But perhaps the most striking difference is The Crowd, with its unfamiliar mix of tawny locals and lobster-red tourists. The...
3 tags
Courtship as a Means to Innovation
A friend recently emailed me to inquire what platform I had been using for my blog because he had grown increasingly frustrated with his own, as it had proven to be quite buggy. This was the first I was hearing about said blog; naturally, I immediately demanded the address. When he obliged, I was delighted to discover a thoughtful, witty, and photo-rich narrative about his travels to far-flung...
2 tags
Hopelandic for Dummies
Like every other Korean-American child, I was propped up on the piano stool and given a quarter-sized violin at a young age. I have very vivid memories of Mrs. Boudreau, our childhood piano teacher, who alternately scolded me for not having my fingers properly curled at the keyboard (as if I were holding an imaginary orange) or for having Ants in My Pants. There weren’t too many adults I...
3 tags
Work in Progress: Small Triumphs
As my role at work seems to move further away from Actively Making Things and increasingly more towards Supporting Others in Making Things, I’ve been thinking a lot (perhaps, too much) about what this means for me as a person whose identity has been largely shaped by the act of making. Truthfully, I’ve been feeling a bit like a Broken Earthworm, one who has somehow managed to lose her...
2 tags
Kindness Found, Opportunity Lost
This morning I was fortunate to observe a small act of kindness. I was deep in thought, making my ritualistic walk to work, when I found myself trailing about ten feet behind a mother and her two sons, presumably on their way to school. I watched as the older of the two boys (about 10, by my estimate) witnessed a woman drop a set of keys as she distractedly rummaged through her purse while...
1 tag
Announcing: Reciprocity!
(Special thanks to Ken. Again.)
3 tags
The Etiquette of Citing References
This morning, I was reading last month’s issue of Psychology Today (affectionately known as the US Weekly of Social Science), when I stumbled across a short article that suggested that there may be a correlation between androgyny and creativity, as researchers believe that androgyny requires flexibility, self-reliance, and a disregard for social norms—traits typically identified with...
3 tags
The Art of Keeping It Short
(Apologies to Josef Albers)
A friend of mine was recently accepted to the MBA program at Stanford. Somehow we got onto the topic of the essays required for his application—especially one in particular: Essay 1: What matters most to you, and why? The best examples of Essay 1 reflect the process of self-examination that you have undertaken to write them. They give us a vivid and genuine image of...
3 tags
Work in Progress: Pretty Bubbles
I’ll never forget the day in grad school when one of our visiting critics referred to my work as Aesthetic Pornography. To me, this was a pivotal moment of the soul-crushing variety—one in which I realized just how easily a designer’s intention could be eclipsed by the viewer’s impression, regardless of how rigorous the designer’s rationale was for the decisions he or she...
3 tags
Episodic Memory: Typewriter as Percussion
I’ve heard that smell is the sense most closely linked to memory, but it was an audio experience that recently elicited recollections from many years ago for me. Music, for many of us, can instantly recall associated memories—typically of the nostalgic, sweet-summer-love-in-the-grass variety. But my experience last week was a new one—it wasn’t the specifics of a particular song or...
3 tags
Top of the Stack: What I'm Reading
As a young child, I was first inspired to learn to read when my older sister, Miro, herself an early reader, suddenly and inexplicably abandoned my company in exchange for Nancy Drew’s. I was eager to understand what was so compelling about this girl with the pert blonde curls and her Old Clocks, Hidden Staircases, and Mysterious Letters. And thus began my childhood entrée as a...
4 tags
Work in Progress: (Mis)Readings
In our apartment, you’ll find stacks of books, magazines, and catalogs in every room. Some are perennial favorites—read, re-read, and referenced on a regular basis—while others have yet to be cracked since arriving home from Amazon or the local bookstore months, sometimes years, ago. We subscribe to a half-dozen magazines, but average at least four weeks behind on the weeklies, particularly...
March 2010
1 post
2 tags
I Heart Life Experiments
Ever since the early days of Friendster, I’ve had to apologetically turn down invitation after invitation to join a variety of social networks. I’ve smiled politely and demurred when people have inquired as to whether I blogged. There was something terrifying about the prospect of living my life out in a public forum, of having my professional and personal worlds collide, of Being...