squeaky nishiki

major minor adjustments

2012-01-14T13:40:00.000-08:00

About a week ago, as Tren Way was riding with gggwqqquuuijjjjjjjjjjjjjjkor8dnjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj jjjjjjjjo905tju66666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666665 l.

Sorry. Heidi Cat sat on the keyboard.

Where was I.... Last week, as we were scouting Borfo's cOld Pasadena Ride, my pal Stevo mentioned that my saddle might be a little high. The general rule of thumb is, when your foot is on the downstroke, your leg should be very slightly bent. But my legs hyperextend — when it felt like my legs were straight, in fact they were bowed slightly in the opposite direction. When it felt like my legs were a little bit bent, they were merely straight, & my lil legs didn't have the full amount of leverage at their disposal. Stevo suggested I lower my saddle just slightly, maybe half an inch.

I lowered it half an inch. My legs felt comically bent. So I raised it back up about 1/8 inch (for a net drop of 3/8 inch). I could tell immediately that I had greater leverage (my bike felt more maneuverable & also lighter). But I felt like I had less muscular strength to call upon. I found myself sliding back in my saddle to get that former amount of leg-stretch, because that's where my muscle-power was, which is kinda funny if you think about it. But I'm forcing myself to sit right, & my muscles are adjusting. It reminds me of some advice from a mechanic at BikeRoWave: If you don't adjust your bike to fit your body, your body will adjust to fit your bike. The mechanic meant it as a warning, but I feel that my body had already (badly) adjusted & that now it's in the process of adjusting in good ways. It feels like existing muscles are shifting to a different part of my legs. I'm not experiencing the soreness one gets from building new muscle. I'm experiencing old muscles figuring out where to go to access their power. It feels strange, but it's starting to feel really good.

All this got me to thinking. I know a fair amount about bikes — I'm not a mechanic by any stretch of the imagination, but I've been riding nearly every day for almost seven years. With the help of the mechanics at various co-ops, I've taken apart & re-assembled every bike I've ever owned, right down to the ball bearings. And I STILL missed the outward clues to a really obvious, major problem. This, while knowing full well about the hyperextension thing — it's considered beautiful in ballet, though it poses its own, different issues for dancers. A little critical distance can be good, to see what I'm too close to see. And it also got me to thinking about adjustments, in general. My seat post wasn't outrageously high for me, but a very small adjustment made a very big difference. It's one of the things I love best about bikes — every single time I ride is an opportunity to assess how things are going & to see what I can improve (in my bike or in my person). This is true of every sport, & ballet too (which is like a sport). But it's especially true with bikes, as there are so many variables to adjust. It's a linear sport — you're always moving forward. Figuratively, too.

eating doughnuts in the service of science

2011-12-27T16:04:00.000-08:00

As both of you know, I've been off the wheat for a while. It's an experiment spurned by the fact that half my family or so can't eat wheat. Can not. Nothing doing. My mother, my aunt Helen, & Helen's daughter Fiona developed celiac disease as adults; Helen's son Steeve has been allergic since birth; & then there's Kevin.

Kevin stopped eating wheat when he noticed it was dragging him down. He just didn't feel good when he ate it. And his symptoms lined up more or less with his glutard relatives, so he just ... stopped. Now, he feels better. This is more or less where I'm at in the game, too. The next step is to go to the doctor to get tested for it.

The tricky thing is, in order for the test to be meaningful, I have to eat wheat again. Just once, to trigger the protein conversion. To get my antibodies to react to the presence of the protein. The test for celiac disease is, in fact, a test for the presence of antibodies against the aberrant converted wheat protein. If I have been excellent about not eating wheat, there won't be any antibodies, & I'll get a negative (whether my mutant genes are modifying the antibody-triggering proteins not).

The other tricky thing is, the body is a very adaptable thing. When it notes that you, the User, aren't regularly introducing what it views as a disease to the system, it heaves a huge sigh of relief & happily goes about focusing its attention to other things. Biking, drawing, writing, doing crossword puzzles, thinking about prime numbers, having benevolence toward humanity. It's not girding itself for a great battle every single day. So then let's say your doc tells you to eat wheat in order to intentionally trigger the mutant protein-conversion process, to get the antibodies to show up, for the sake of the test. But while I, the User, know that a great battle is coming, my internal organs & wheat-protein-converting mutant genes ... don't. They are blindsided, having been long out of battle practice. And the battle is significantly worse than when the antibodies fought for the User back in her doughnut days. Kevin, knowing this from his family members who HAVE had the test, opts out. No, thanks. It was bad enough before, he doesn't need to start a battle today. I, myself, went into battle recently when I fucked up one night & drank one beer. I felt sick for two days.

It was a Maredsous 8 Brune. My favorite beer across all time & space. It was almost worth it.

Kevin's solution is to not eat that doughnut, to not get tested. I like Kevin's solution. It's not that I don't trust or need medical confirmation, it's that it would be merely that — confirmation of something that I viscerally know to be true. I'm still in the midst of the experiment. I said I'd give it a couple months, & it's only been a few weeks. However, I'm not certain I want to intentionally make myself sick when the couple months are up. You can call it willful ignorance, if you like. I call it refusing to curse the darkness & instead just lighting a damned candle. We'll see.

Speaking of lighting candles, here's a thing Errol Morris wrote about the benefits of cursing the darkness. He is a funny doughnut-eater.

sometimes

2011-12-27T03:01:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, when I arrive home & chuck my bike on my shoulder & run up my stairs, when I catch my breath & my eyes fall on the Motobecane ... sometimes, I decide I should just yank that old whitewall off it that very instant. I should put on the matching blue-striped tire &, while I'm at it, I could probably stand to patch up one of the old 27x1-1/2s I've got lying around so that I have a spare but, wouldn't you know it, I need it now, so wasn't that a lucky thing. Then I look up & see that it's 2:45 in the morning, & I wonder if my roommates think I'm crazy.

And then I look down at my grease-stained fingers. I look at the TWO tire levers I've broken in an effort to get that damned ancient tire off (it was utterly ossified), & I look at the shredded selfsame ossified tire I eventually sliced off with an x-acto blade. Sometimes, I smile a little & I think, "No. They don't think anything about my sanity. They know."

writing about reading

2011-12-19T13:11:00.000-08:00

My sister is a great reader. She's really good at it. What makes her a great reader, though, is not her commitment to reading only great works, as determined by those who purport to know such things. She's great at it because she does it a lot. All three of us do. We come by it honestly.

Our childhood home has a wall of reference books. Flanking the 1978 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (which was regularly splayed out in layers on the kitchen table as we reference-hopped from one entry to another) are sections about Ireland, dance, medicine, art, physics, & other subjects. I remember wanting to re-shelve the medical illustration books in the art section because the transparent overlays were fascinating & beautiful &, to my young mind, not much different from the books of marble statues. The diagram of the respiratory system had as much aesthetic value as the Pieta. But don't tell the Pope I said that.

We also had subscriptions to a wide array of magazines. Our parents are good at many things, but one thing they're REALLY good at is being curious. They wanted to know more about what was going on in the world, everywhere, in as many realms as possible. National Geographic, The New Yorker, Reader's Digest, The Economist, Mother Jones, the Atlantic Monthly, Ms. Magazine, Time, Popular Mechanics, WIRED, the National Enquirer.

(Wait, what?)

The National Enquirer. What in the world did they imagine they would learn from a crappy tabloid with cyclical headlines about Bat Boy? So many things, it turns out. In the absence of myths, in the absence of a shared lore, we have Chupacabra, Elvis is Alive!, & the Blue Dot. If I wish very hard while touching this one imperfectly-printed circle of pure cyan, will my wish come true? Maybe! Is the Loch Ness Monster the last living dinosaur? A Catholic priest in Scotland says yes! So while we'd anxiously await our turn at our favorite magazines (I admired Tina Brown's moxie at getting longer stories in The New Yorker, though some of them were a real slog for me), it was always a special treat to follow it up with the serialized fiction of the National Enquirer. And I am not ashamed.

I may be biased toward the tabloids, though. Our family was featured in the Star, when I was about three. The topic: Two doctor sisters with a unique solution to child care. (They job-shared. Whomever didn't go into the hospital that day took care of ... seven children. The dads helped, too, of course, but that wasn't as tidy a story in 1981.) It was August. I look uncomfortably warm in a terry-cloth jumper. I have a perfect bowl cut. And a book in my hands. Like I said, we come by it honestly.

After you put down your copy of the National Enquirer, which will make you a better writer if for no other reason than it will expand your notion of the absurd, I'd like to share ... a list of great works, as determined by people who purport to know such things. Our Favorite Authors' Favorite Books of 2011.

In particular, here's a link to Colm Tóibín's recommendations as a reminder to myself:
a.) Read Tóibín's collection of stories, "The Empty Family"; and
b.) Read Tóibín's recommendations, too: Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Marriage Plot" & Craig Koslofsky's "Evening's Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe". Actually, this whole list makes me want to attack a library. ("Room" by Emma Donoghue sounds excellent.)

holy-day cards

2011-12-15T00:22:00.000-08:00

I call them Holiday Cards, because sometimes they have a picture of a Christmas tree or a Menorah or a Celtic (Pagan) cross or a snowy, secular Mount Lassen. But they arrive in December. It's the end of the year. As we draw nearer to the marker between one year & the next, it's a convenient time to reflect on the good stuff & the bad stuff & to think about what we hope is to come. It's something to do with the Solstice — the turning from a time of darkness to a time of bounty, of light, of hope. Bundle up. We can do this.

It could be argued that this turning from a time of darkness to a time of light happens every single day. What a holy day is THAT, Tuesday! But this is another post for another day.

My friend Joe Anthony expressed his frustration & also his joy surrounding the holiday card tradition on the innertubes earlier today. He said he thinks the tradition is "stupid, shallow, & wasteful", yet still it makes him immensely happy. I agree: The tradition can be stupid, shallow, & wasteful ... if there's no thought put into it. But it can also be incredibly rewarding, both for the person who sends the card & the person who receives it.

I don't make holiday cards. I make cards (tiny books, more like) whenever the mood strikes me, unattached to holy days. Sometimes, it happens in July. Or April. Or September, or January, ... or December. But I love a good card. The best card I ever got was bought off-the-shelf, probably years before it was sent. It was a Thank You card. It arrived on my birthday. I've moved at least six times since the receipt of that card, & to find it again would require a deep search of my entire belongings, but I have it still. On the inside of this Thank You card were the following words:

"I didn't have a birthday card in the file I keep at my desk, so I'm taking this opportunity to thank you for being a wonderful daughter. I'm proud of you. Love, Dad."

Read the first part of the first sentence, & you'll see an admission: Every other year, he has pulled a card with the word "Birthday" somewhere on it from a file, signed it, & mailed it off. There's a cheapness to that, a wastefulness, a shallowness. But keep reading, & (if you're me) you'll break down into a mess of tears, in public, as your father tells you the one thing you ever really wanted to hear from him. "I'm proud of you." Fucking hell, Dad.

What I mean to say is, it doesn't matter if you spent days seeking out a card that better words your feelings than you ever could, or if you found the blankest of blank cards & wrote just the two things you needed to say, or if you hand-crafted a tiny novella & stitched the pages together with gold thread. Sincerity, gratitude, & love are never wasteful, never shallow, never cheap. I understand what you mean, Joe, about the potential for this tradition to be sad & sorry & small. And I understand, also, your joy at exploring the other end of this tradition's potential. I'm with ya. Get the pens.

fail harder

2011-12-08T00:19:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time, I participated in a wacky advertising collective called WK12. Wieden+Kennedy 12 is "an experiment, disguised as an agency, disguised as an ad school." We made things on behalf of brands, in order to help those brands speak more truthfully, more honestly, about themselves. It felt more like art school — incredibly intellectually rigorous art school that allowed (demanded) that we come up with six different formal executions before we started working on any of them. We used to have to come up with a list of a hundred ideas. We became idea machines. (Not all of the ideas were good.)

But it wasn't art school. We were in the business of communication. The froofie way of describing what we did is how I stated it above. The more straightforward way: We were selling stuff. Good stuff, for sure, but it cannot be denied that we were coming up with pieces of communication in the service of a product. Or an idea. Or an event. In doing that, it's important to be clear, concise, & direct. You cannot obscure your meaning. You can be poetic, but you must be succint.

This past spring, the current class of WK12 held an art show, inviting all students past & present to submit something. The theme of the show was "Fail Gloriously", a riff on the Fail Harder idea. Failing isn't always bad. Failing teaches you things. Failure is not something to be feared. It happens when you aim high & when you take risks, both of which are admirable things to do. It's what you do after you fail that makes the difference. And shit, if you aim high & then you fail big, you already know how to aim high again, right? It's not so hard the second time around. And that time, you might succeed big. I'm just saying.

Here's what I wrote:

The only books I've typeset, printed, trimmed, & bound by hand this whole year were requests for transfer from the coffee shop at which I currently work to another one.

Now, that's failure. On a bunch of levels. I love to make books — small, folded paper or hand-bound, printed or hand-written, with a cover or without. I love laying out type, I love folding, I love binding. It's a perfect little joy of a thing to hold in your hands. But I'd somehow allowed myself to believe that I was too busy or too tired or too ... something ... to do this thing that I loved. Another failure: I had attended this prestigious school, been under the guidance of some brilliant thinkers, been exposed to some of advertising's most influential & powerful people ... & now I work at a coffee shop. On paper, that looks like failure. (Off paper: The benefits of not working a 60-70 hour workweek cannot be overstated; Intelligentsia is doing incredible work for global sustainability & development, which is something I prize highly in an employer; & I really, really, really like coffee). So I made a piece which, not coincidentally, read like a book — multiple pages of text printed on transparencies mounted on a backing of shellacked, hand-lettered wood. And just yesterday, after the receipt of a piece of ancient technology that will speed up my process considerably, I re-did it. I ripped off the transparencies & painted the two pages of text right onto the wood. One on top of the other. It's aesthetically wayyyyy more pleasing than transparencies. And, it's a better failure.

Because you can't read it.

"A Failure of Communication", 2011. Acrylic & shellac on wood.

The result of submitting the piece to the show this summer was my name in a catalogue, a great compliment from the current director of the school, & a commitment to never again de-prioritizing the things that I love. And I started making books again. If I have a reason to write something down, I make it into a book. I made a shopping-list book once. I left it on a grocery store shelf. I hope someone found it. Because it was made outta love.

wheat trouble

2011-12-05T10:55:00.001-08:00

I'm sitting here, drinking a cup of Kenya/Ethiopia coffee (I didn't have enough of the Gichathaini for a full cup, so I supplemented it with some old Yirgacheffe I had lying around), marveling at how good I feel. I woke up rested, calm, & happy. I have energy, & I have the inspiration to get up & do the things that I want to do (like, say, write). I feel very, very good.

This is in contrast to just a few days ago. I was downright giddy. All the time. I smiled at strangers, my days were a frenzy of activity & good will, & I was remarkably uninhibited. It felt like I was a little bit drunk, all of the time. It startled me, frankly. It felt good, but it was unnerving. I kept stating it: "Hi! I feel giddy. How are you?"

Fortunately, I wasn't actually drunk, & I decided to use this hiccup of good feeling wisely. I used this newfound energy not in making things (I have a few art projects in various stages of completion & a book to write), but in setting up the proper conditions to create better, later on. I didn't believe that this uplift in spirits & productivity was going to last, so I figured I'd better prepare. And I was right — it didn't last. But this is a good thing. One can't be drunk all the time.

Well. One can. But it's not recommended.

"So what changed? Why the giddiness?" Well, thanks for asking. Before The Giddiness, I stopped eating wheat. My family is Irish, if that wasn't patently obvious. People of Northern European descent are more apt than others to develop something called celiac disease (they aren't born with it — my mom developed it in her fifties). The short version of celiac disease is, when I eat wheat, an enzyme in my person modifies some proteins in said wheat, & my immune system is all just like "WHAT, NO." My immune system then goes about fighting those proteins as though they were foreign bodies, like it would fight a virus. The crux is in the modification. People without celiac disease don't modify that protein, & they go about their doughnut-eatin' ways. (Poor saps.) People with celiac disease, in contrast, feel like all of their systems are just a little bit depressed. This is because they are. Their immune system is taking up much of the body's energy to fight this "virus". They experience fatigue, stomach upset, & lowered mood — everything from crankiness to mild depression. To keep with the booze analogy, I felt like I had a teensy, tiny hangover. All of the time. But since it got progressively worse over time, I didn't notice. I kept re-setting what "normal" meant. But there came a point when "normal" felt so ... abnormal, that I decided to do an experiment.

The experiment is still in the works. I'm simply & only cutting wheat out of my diet for a while, to see what happens. The Giddiness happened, but it's ebbing, & now I feel merely very good. Also of note: The emergence of The Giddiness doesn't necessarily mean that I have developed celiac disease. It means that I might. It's possible I can stave it off, if I cut wheat out now. Conveniently, the treatment is the same: Don't eat wheat. The difference is in the degree of terrible I will feel if I do eat wheat. If I stave off the disease but then at some point eat wheat unknowingly, I will feel down & gross & cranky for a small time. If I keep eating wheat until I develop celiac disease, then at some point eat wheat unknowingly, I will feel terrible. Maybe for days. So, y'know ... I should just stop eating wheat now.

"A stitch, in time, saves nine." Or so the kids say. But man — I'm gonna miss you, doughnuts.

learning how to breathe

2011-11-30T02:38:00.001-08:00

Three nights a week, I finish up work after the last train leaves. And so I drink sixteen ounces of sparkling water, saddle up, & hit the road. It's just shy of eleven miles from Old Pasadena to Angeleno Heights. It's no century, but it's long enough for me to notice a few things along the way. Like breathing.

I used to be a ballet dancer. One thing I learned through dance is the importance of using my breath in exercise — that the pattern of my breathing could work with me or against me. Let's say I'm doing small jumps (petit allegro*). It feels right to inhale as I jump up, then exhale as I land, with every small jump. It's what my body wants to do, to maintain a perfect one-to-one ratio of jumps to breaths. But the jumps are so fast that I can't get enough air in my lungs if I stick to the tempo. It's not efficient. And when you're performing as one of the Cygnets in Swan Lake, the number one aces top thing you can do to not suffer the fate of Moira Shearer is be efficient. (The number two thing you can do is stay perfectly, exactly in time with the music alongside the three other dancers; if you don't, you'll accidentally kick one of them, ruining the performance, & they will drag you backstage & murder you.)

I'm riding along Fair Oaks, not paying attention to much, when I sneeze. Twice. (I always sneeze in pairs.) I've just expelled all the air from my lungs, so I take a monstrous breath**. And then I let it out. It takes me two 360º revolutions of my pedals to exhale. And it feels pretty good. I slip into shallow breathing again (more or less one inhale-exhale couplet per 360º pedal revolution), but I notice that it feels ... not as good. I breathe slowly again. One full revolution to breathe in, one full revolution to breathe out, so half the speed. Then I inhale slower: once per every TWO full revolutions (& exhale at the same rate). And I keep at it for a while. And it feels amazing. Meanwhile, I notice that, with my current gear ratio, my breathing is just a tiny bit faster than my legs, which means my legs are constantly trying to speed up, to make my cadence match my breath. Which, coincidentally, is the same thing as going faster***. And wouldn't you know it, while I'm focusing on my breathing & my legs are focusing on my lungs, it's easier & more efficient to stay in the saddle instead of standing up, which means I'm using more of my legs, which makes them go faster, which makes me able to slow down my breath even more.

Then it gets fun. So two full revolutions per inhale (then two again per exhale) feels good, but what about two & a half? Two revolutions are easily split into four parts (right-left-right-left), so I just add one. Right-left-right-left-right on the inhale, then left-right-left-right-left on the exhale****. Then I let my cadence & my breathing get out of sync for a bit as I force my lungs to slow down & I try for three revolutions. I become a monster. I tear down hills, I annihilate corners, I chew up the road, & out of nowhere emerges the intersection of Figueroa & Cypress.

I can't believe I didn't know this. I mean, I knew this once. But I didn't translate it. Did you know this? For me, it's a revelation, a minor miracle, a marvel of physiology, & the most obvious thing in the world. I feel silly & proud at the same time. And oxygen-drunk. It's cool stuff, that oxygen. You should try it.

———————————————————

* "Petit allegro" — I know, I know, the first word is French, & the second word is Italian. That's what happens when French dance people name stuff using Italian music-notation descriptions. (There's "grand allegro", too.)

** A beast of a gasp.
*** This is where the analogy with dance breaks down. You can't — shouldn't — dance any faster than the music tells you to dance. But you can adjust your breath all the same.

**** Is there a less clunky way of describing the details of one's cadence? I hope so.

this actually happened

2011-11-28T01:01:00.001-08:00

On the last leg of my ride home, at about Sunset & Beaudry, I pass an old duffer in the bike lane. My bell rings, unprovoked, because my bell does that. But the guy changes gears, speeds up, & snorts,"What're you running, 35/17?" I counter, "48/15!" "Gears are good, y'know, for hills like these." "Is this a hill?" I meant to be funny.

We ride maybe a quarter of a mile in silence.

"I never did understand the whole no-gears thing," he finally says. "It's only good for riding on flats." I respond, "You should try it. It's very different. I ride both geared & fixed. And hey, if you ride both, maybe then you won't get passed on the road by a girl." I'm smiling though, hoping he can hear it. That he can tell I'm ribbing him, one rider to another.

One must smile in this circumstance, but it's an effort. I've been smiling all day. And this is the tenth & final mile of my ride home. And I'm tired. Sometimes, you just don't want to smile anymore.

He turns right, & I change lanes to turn left. My bell rings of its own volition, again. I consider wishing him a good ride, but then I think better of it. My face falls back to its usual riding expression — flat eyebrows, small mouth. I ride up the one hill, then I ride up the other hill, slowly, with great effort, & then I'm home.

je suis venue te dire que je m'en vais

2011-07-10T02:31:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving you. I'm sorry. I love you, but I have to go.
Otheroom, Sunday 7/17 9pm for one last goodbye, until I see you again.

i quit

2011-04-23T12:10:00.000-07:00

There are things that we do that we're proud of, & there are things that we do that we are not proud of. For the past ten years, I have gone back & forth, caring that I did something of which I wasn't proud vs. not caring. Does that make sense? No, right? So I did something about it.

I quit smoking.

Below is a pretty good list of reasons I might have quit:

· I taste things, professionally. And smoking gets in the way of my ability to taste things. And smell things. It prevents me from being as good at my job as I could be.
· Meanwhile, to be seen hampering my ability to taste lessens others' faith in how well I do my job. Employers, colleagues & customers, some of whom ask me on the regular for advice on coffees.
· Continuing to smoke — choosing to smoke — while knowing full well that it brings about an early, painful death is basically saying that I want to die. But the thing is, I don't want to die.
· It lessens my enjoyment of other things that are important in my life. Like food, coffee, biking, breathing, walking, singing, & feeling good.

But those aren't the reasons that I quit. I quit because I wasn't proud of it. And I would like to be proud of every damned thing that I do. I am not proud that I started when I was so young. I'm not proud that I gave money to the tobacco industry, on & off, for fifteen years. I am not proud that I allowed myself to be complacent when I knew it was out of step with what I believed in. And one day, I realized just exactly how un-proud I was, & from that moment forward I didn't want anything to do with it anymore.

So far, quitting has not been difficult. In fact, it's been remarkably easy. Perhaps this has to do with my reason for quitting — I'm not withholding something from myself that I want to have. I just don't want to want it any more. And that feels incredible.

thanksgiving

2010-11-25T19:41:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is a special holiday for me & my family. We're scrappers. We work hard, as a rule, & we're ambitious. There are reasons for this.

My father was born almost exactly one year before the Great Depression struck. Thirteen years later, his father left his wife & five children. And so: My grandmother, after whom I'm named was suddenly a single mother of five in the throes of the biggest financial crisis this country had ever had (& has had to date). My dad, fiscally anyway, was essentially an orphan, though obviously he had the love of his mother & his four siblings. Not long after, his estranged father died, granting Dad & his siblings access to Mooseheart. Mooseheart is a boarding school in Brookfield, Illinois, for the surviving children of men who belonged to the Loyal Order of the Moose. I'm 100% serious.

My mother was born in Dublin, Ireland. At an early age (13!), she decided she wanted to practice medicine. But there were a couple snags. She was a woman, in the fifties, in Ireland. She actually had to get special dispensation from the Catholic Bishop in Ireland in order to attend the (Protestant) college that would best prepare her for medical school. And he said "no". (I guess it's only the Pope that's infallible — Bishops err.) The other good college in Ireland told her she was too young (she skipped a grade). Wait, what? And so she, her parents, & her two sisters (also medically inclined) moved to America in pursuit of better sense. Her parents didn't have anything lined up in America, by the way. It was an act of faith I can hardly fathom, but the three daughters backed it up with personal sacrifice & incredibly hard work, & all three became successful anesthesiologists. (My mom says that putting people to sleep is the easy part — the trick is waking them up.)

Those two stories pretty much sum up the American Dream. It worked. We have plenty to be thankful for.

This year, I did not spend Thanksgiving with my family. I spent Thanksgiving in Los Angeles, doing a medium-sized collection of things that needed to be done, things that didn't require businesses to be open. Tragically boring things. I can't be thankful for spending time with other Thanksgiving Orphans, I can't be thankful for a huge meal, & I can't be thankful for my beloved at my side (I broke up with him four days ago because I have excellent timing). I can be thankful, however, for the following things:

· My father's dedication to education, both his & ours
· My mother's obvious joy in what she does, starting with medicine & continuing now to local politics & community service
· My sister's ability to come up with groundbreaking ideas that change how people think ... & then act upon them, bettering people's lives in very real ways
· My brother's incredible ability to focus, setting the standard for what it means to be good at something

I want to go on & on, listing every family member downward & upward & out, but as you might imagine with a name like Kathleen O'Shea, we are rather Irish & rather Catholic, & so there are an awful lot of us. This, long enough even as a piece of writing, is my very long-winded Thanksgiving Grace. There's no god in it. There's not even very much luck. There is hard work, & there are lessons, & there is the sense that "goodness" is made, not inherited or chanced-upon. My folks are good, & I am proud of them, & I am thankful that they have shown me how good "good" can be, & I only hope that I can someday be as good as them.

OK, let's go eat some fuckin' turkey.

new coke

2009-12-14T19:41:00.000-08:00

An article from Wired UK titled "Meet Bruce Mau. He wants to redesign the world." has been making the rounds on the innertubes lately. I like & admire Bruce Mau. He has insightful opinions about brands & branding, & I'm impressed Coca Cola looked to him for his point of view. But a couple sentences early in the article made me stop reading, suddenly & utterly bored.

"Mau observed later that [a commenter at a business conference] was ... representative of what Coke and every other company is up against these days: a public that is more aware of, and concerned about, what firms are doing - and one that also has more ability to question and challenge business than ever before. Companies such as Coke are realising that they must adapt and adjust their behaviour to survive this new level of scrutiny."

Gross!

I often think of brands as people. Are they doing something interesting? Something new? Are they standing tall for what they believe in, sticking to their guns, fighting the good fight? Or any fight. And are they ... you know. Nice? Would I want to talk to this person at a party?

Coca Cola makes sugar water. (Delicious, delicious sugar water, mmmm.) Not new, not that interesting. Okay, so maybe their tastes & values are different than mine. But Mau is suggesting they seek out what people want from them, then change the whole timbre of the brand. He's advising a huge multinational corporation to become boring, sycophantic, & kind of ... sad. I don't want to talk to that person at a party.

It's not that I don't think Coca Cola should be held accountable — I do. And it's good that people are looking closer at the companies to whom they give their money — I'm a fan of voting with money. It's the "adapting & adjusting their behavio(u)r to this new level of scrutiny." No. Be awesome, for its own sake. Or don't be awesome. But always be something. Even you, Coca Cola.

— · — · — · — · — · — · —

Okay, okay, I finished the article. Okay. Curiosity got the better of me, & I was willing to be outraged. (Outrage can be good!) And I re-discovered that Bruce Mau is fucking rad. But I also have very little faith that all the ways in which Coca Cola is attempting to re-organize the company — to "make more sustainable, make more of what we love, using less of what we need" — has anything to do with Coca Cola suddenly becoming awesome thought-leaders & everything to do with Coca Cola wanting everyone to love them, just please won't we only love them, & doing whatever it takes to that end whether they believe in what they're doing or not. And, like I said, that's sad. And the mark of insecurity & fear. And disappointing.

bikes in cities

2009-12-02T21:28:00.000-08:00

I first started biking when I moved to Portland, OR, where I was a student looking to save some dimes. I wanted to pay for transportation exactly once. No fares, no gas, no insurance, no licensing. I bought a bike, & I rode it every day, & I took it in for repairs two times. Once, I broke a spoke. And once, I got a flat.

I didn't know how to repair a flat.

Then, I moved to Los Angeles, & I didn't ride for about six months. But I missed it. If I worked on the weekends, I rode in, to "treat" myself. Then, I started to "treat" myself every day because I could see no reason not to. I learned how to repair a flat, how to adjust my brakes, saddle height, derailleurs, &c., because I had to. My bike started to fall apart all of a sudden, it seemed, because I was riding it much more, & because I had enjoyed startlingly good luck in Portland. I amassed a small bag of tools, which I kept with me at all times.

My fourth (or maybe fifth) group ride in Los Angeles.

Later still, I discovered Midnight Ridazz. It took me about four months after I started riding every day to learn that thousands of other riders were doing the same all throughout the city, the Valley, Orange County, the Westside, the Eastside. Bikes were everywhere, but they had been invisible, even to me. In retrospect, this is almost inconceivable. Riders in Los Angeles are the most tight-knit group of people I've ever come across, anywhere, & the most welcoming. (I was jumped into a bike gang on my third ride, by SP00K.) How did I miss this? Now, I'm (unofficially) a member of three bike gangs. There is no rivalry; we all go to each others' birthday parties.

Ridge Way Bike House turns 2.

I don't think bikers in Portland are as galvanized. I figure it's because bikers are as common as the roses that grow untended there. Like their roses, it's just as beautiful a thing, but it's not so very special. In Los Angeles, riding a bike is a strange thing to do. When seeing someone else riding on the road, I look to see if I know them, & often enough I do. If I don't know them, I nod. A tacit acknowledgment that we both know what's up. It's a unifying activity here, whereas in cities where it's more common, it doesn't mean as much.

Another thing: In Los Angeles, riders don't seem to care much about what you ride. I mean, they care — they appreciate a good whip. But I ride with fixed gear riders, geared riders, mountain bikers, BMX tricksters, chopper bike riders, tall bikers, road racers, polo bikers, velodrome rats, & even people who ride recumbents.

Just kidding. Not recumbents.

I rode this bike once. ONCE.

Every day is a custom bike show. Every night is a ride, usually several. Alleycats every weekend. Name a holiday — Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, your birthday, your dad's birthday, Arbor Day. There's a ride that day. Ahh, enthusiasm. It's fucking scintillating.

SCINTILLATING RIDES:

The Ride with No Name
The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time
C.R.A.N.K. MOB (The Wonder Year)
Westside Mosey
ROB010100100101010TZ
Midnight Ridazz (official) rides
Wolfpack Hustle
Cub Camp
All those rides that wound up on the beach in the middle of the night, & then there was swimming, & Trouble

Go ride.

Love,
Katie

listed

2009-11-29T20:01:00.000-08:00

Twitter's been offering lists. (This is not really news — it's been going on for some time.) Opens up a whole new world of people, their opinions, & what they're eating for breakfast without having to follow every damned one & jam up your feed with Cocoa Puffs. It's cool.

Cooler still, I'm listed some times. HOLLA.

Not to scale.

It's interesting to see the order in which I was added to lists. (Top down, newest to oldest, on that list page I lunk to above the chart.) Seems it was my coffee people who decided to sort their people first. Then bikers, then Angelenos, then people who enjoy enjoyment. Generally.

I figure coffee people tend to have varied interests — many of them do outstanding, silly things when they aren't changing the face & the heart of the coffee industry one cup at a time. Bikers, on the other hand, often spend an awful lot of time with other bikers, irrespective of what they do for a living. As such: My coffee pals sorted early because the list feature was more useful to them, & those coffee-people lists are at the bottom of the page. Though I am bike-listed most, bikers are late listers, & so those lists are at the top of the page. Do you see what I'm saying here?

No? Let me be more clear. If the ride posting says the ride leaves at 8, maybe think about getting to the start point by 8. Jesus christ.

Love,
Katie

coffee stops: san francisco (& environs) edition

2009-11-29T19:32:00.000-08:00

In order of attendance, based on location:

BLUE BOTTLE
66 Mint Street at Jessie.
SF, CA.

SIGHTGLASS
270 7th Street at Folsom.
SF, CA.
*** Closed. On the Friday after Thanksgiving. What the.***

FOUR BARREL
375 Valencia at 15th.
SF, CA.

RITUAL COFFEE ROASTERS
1026 Valencia Street at 21st.
SF, CA.

BAREFOOT COFFEE ROASTERS
5237 Stevens Creek Blvd
Santa Clara, CA.

Not shown: Barefoot Coffee. We did not walk there.

I am certain there are scads of good shops in the East Bay. But time dictated I limit my tour. Since San Francisco is only 7mi x 7mi, & since there were four known shops I wanted to visit, ... well. Bingo, bango. I would love, also, at some point to wrangle an invitation to tour Sweet Maria's in West Oakland. Let It Be Known.

Love,
Katie

coffee stops

2009-09-29T00:49:00.000-07:00

When not witnessing what has got to be the most beautiful wedding ceremony in the history of wedding ceremonies, during which the groom stood watching his future bride wait for Saint-Saens' "The Swan" to begin so she could walk down the aisle & he subtly urged her with nothing but excitement & love to hurry up so he could marry the hell out of her already ("Come on, come on, come on ... "), I was drinking a lot of coffee.

I hit Manhattan at 5pm Friday, was indisposed all of Saturday (with, you know, that gorgeous, simple, elegant, touching wedding), I was back in New York at close to noon, & I left for my flight at 6:30. That's roughly nine hours devoted to coffee (& the getting-to of it).

Friday, I covered Manhattan. Sunday was Brooklyn. I had a macchiato at each place & sometimes one other drink. Behold: Where I went, & one notable thing about each place.

GIMME! COFFEE, 228 Mott Street (at Prince & Spring). Crazy friendly staff who picked up on my questions about their beans & took the conversation further still into coffee geekdom's dark, delicious heart.

NINTH STREET ESPRESSO, 700 East 9th Street (at Loisaida). Young whippersnapper standing in front of a chalkboard sign with seven drinks listed. Seven! That's it! I didn't see because I wasn't looking, but I don't remember a station for customers to add cream & sugar to their coffee*.

* What if there were a shop with no cream or sugar, at all? WHAT IF. Wait, I like cream in my Toddy. Damn.

STUMPTOWN AT THE ACE HOTEL, 20 West 29th Street (at Broadway). Stylish, professional, friendly. But not too friendly. At other shops, I felt at ease asking questions about the components of their blends, what kind of machines they were brewing on, &c. But at this place, there was a high-end service air that, while very nice indeed, kept me at a distance. Part of this may have been a function of the physical layout of the place — I'm not particularly tall. The counter, it was tall. Or the baristas are tall, or are raised up on a platform, or something. They were ... higher than me.

MANHATTAN
- - - - - - - - -
BROOKLYN

SOUTHSIDE COFFEE, 652 6th Avenue (at 17th Street). I was served by Intelligentsia's newly-named East Coast Educator, Ramin Narimani! He seemed genuinely excited to meet an Intelligentsia person, & we talked shop for a good long time. I hope he swings through Los Angeles, as he's a helluva chap.

GIMME! COFFEE, 495 Lorimer Street (at Powers). Chock fulla customers who stood at the espresso bar & talked (about coffee, mostly). The barista was in the middle of giving coffee recommendations in Los Angeles when I walked up to the bar!

CAFE GRUMPY, 193 Meserole (at Diamond). HUGE space with two rooms — small tables out front & larger tables in a more brightly-lit room out back. They've recently started roasting their own beans, though I don't know if that's what I was drinking — I knew the barista, as it happens, & we spent most of the time talking about people, not beans. Notable for me, but not for you ... I'm sorry.

More beholding:
· New York is no longer the land of dishwater coffee I remember. That was a rough time, the late nineties/early naughts. (It was during this Rough Time that my brother gave me a French Press. Thank you, Brian!)
· I half-expected baristas in New York to be standoffish & wary of my pointed questions, but across the board, they were friendly & informed & happy to talk about their beans, machines, brew methods, &c. Yay.
· It seems there are more specialty coffee shops in Brooklyn than in Manhattan. This makes sense to me; Manhattan is a busy hub, with people rushing to and from all boroughs & even home. (Yes, some people with more money than sense live in Manhattan. I KNOW.) But people live in Brooklyn. It's where they spend their downtime, their weekends. They take time, because they have time, & they are willing to wait a couple minutes for coffee that tastes good. Brooklyn is also where a lot of creative arty types live, & arty types are, by definition, aesthetes, & one aspect of aestheticism is the sense of taste. POW.

That's it! See y'all at Station 2.

very high opera

2009-09-28T03:34:00.000-07:00

I flew to New Jersey for my good friends Catherine & Aaron's wedding this weekend. I flew in to New York early, stopped off at a couple recommended coffee places, stayed at a VERY stylie hotel in the very unlikely Upper East Side, took a train to New Jersey, watched a truly beautiful ceremony followed by a wonderful reception (when an architect & a graphic designer get married, no detail is spared attention), hit up several more coffee shops back in New York the next day (more on the coffee stops later), then flew back on a not-quite-red-eye last night.

The flight was supposed to leave at 8:25pm but was delayed, leaving just shy of 11.

The seat I was supposed to take was occupied by one half of a couple not seated together. So I offered to switch. Then I noticed, too late — my new seat had me next to a young mother with a squalling one-year-old baby girl in her arms.

Sequence of thoughts:
· Gonna be a long flight.
· I've slept through a bachelor party raging outside my bedroom door ... I can do this.
· Whoah — this kid has some lungs. Operatic, if it were a toneless, discordant, expression-of-basest-needs kind of opera.
· Why can't this mother calm her child? Oh, right ... because you can't explain to a one-year-old that the change in air pressure is what's causing the weird feeling in her inner ear, which is INSIDE OF HER HEAD, & that the floor churning like that is totally expected & normal & actually kind of funny when you look at all the people lurching down the aisles on the way to the bathroom. The little girl hasn't figured out language yet. It's also probably the first time this has happened to her.
· Why did the mother even BRING such a young child, then? Oh, RIGHT. Because not everyone has local relatives (as I did growing up) or the means to hire someone (as my parents didn't) to watch squalling one-year-olds for weekends. And because it takes a while to teach kids to understand language & to speak it — years, in fact. So if she doesn't have anyone to watch her kid, then she can't go. Confining a new mom to her home FOR YEARS is a surefire way to make said mom one batshit crazy-face emmer effer, which is, like, bad for society. Making mothers crazy makes children crazy, & everyone was a child once.
· Teaching people to be okay with crying babies makes us better people. Babies cry. Everybody, let's toughen up.

If anyone else on that flight was going through the same thought sequence, they didn't get to these last couple points. There were a lot of passive-aggressive stage whispers, disapproving tut-tuts, & throwing of daggers from eyes. (I was guilty of the eye-daggers at first, I admit.) OK, yeah, it was annoying, but who has ever been a squalling one-year-old? Every damned one of us. You were probably a freaking terror every once in a while. It's not a matter of not being able to control your kid (at age one ... hah!); it's not a matter of whether the mom should be allowed out (like I said ... for several years? Cruel & unusual). Kids. They freak out. It's what they do.

So I turned to the mom & asked her how she was doing. And meant it. It led to a bona fide conversation — What were you doing in New York? First time visiting? Where'd y'all go? — you know. Normal conversations you might have with a human being. (Which I almost never do on planes. The potential for your aisle-mate to turn out to be a life coach is too great.) Turns out we both are fans of the same cinema house, & she's hoping to get an advanced degree in film once her little moppet's a little less little.

I hope she does. I think having interests other than every little thing your baby does is healthy & good. And I think it's hard to manage, once you have that squalling one-year-old. It kills me to see people (often but not always women) viewed as this totally other animal once they have children. Mothers & fathers are still people. This one happened to be smart, & funny, & sweet, & very upset that her daughter was causing so much grief to the other passengers. But the dagger eyes & the whispering wasn't helping. Kids pick up on stuff. This one-year-old was sensing her mother's distress, which only amplified her own. Relating to the mother as a human being (instead of instantly categorizing her as "bad mother", or even "good mother" — we don't really have the right to make value judgments on so little information) ... it was clearly a relief, which — surprise, surprise — calmed Skyla down. Empathy. A little bit goes a long way.

Skyla, by the way, is a Hindi name. (Her mom was born in India.) It means "Child of the Heavens." Indeed. Teaching people all kinds of stuff, way up at 30,000 feet. Good work, kid.

coffee, bikes, art

2009-08-01T23:15:00.000-07:00

I often moodle around with the idea of integrating the things I care about into something more cohesive. I don't compartmentalize well — I tend to do the hell out of one thing, often to the exclusion of others. (Recently, I've been doing the hell out of coffee but trying to keep my fingers in the pool of design, writing, & of course bikes.)

I also wonder if integrating the things I care about into one superthing is just a lazy way of changing the definition of a situation into not-a-problem rather than solving the problem.

And then I wonder if that's bad.

My sister, who is amazing, moved to Cambodia (!) when she was 25 (!!!) & started a non-profit micro-loan organization primarily for disabled people, who are severely discriminated against in Cambodia. (I could write a book about that.) The grass-roots non-profit, internationally funded & locally staffed, had a café as its public-facing element. You could help out by eating a cookie, or you could sit with that cookie & learn more, see where your own skills fit in to their current projects, or you could donate a few riel. She integrated cooking (specifically baking), human rights, Cambodia, & her incredible ability to talk to anyone about anything, into something truly groundbreaking. She changed the way people thought about charity, not to mention helped countless people get back on their feet with their own good ideas & their own two hands. Or one hand, depending on their disability.

But she didn't study baking, she worked at a bakery in college. She didn't study international relations, she took a vacation & fell in love with the region. What she did study was philosophy ... which included a lot of reading & writing about ethics & law, which is important for human rights & advocacy work. And she might be the most empathetic person I've ever met. She didn't really have a plan, not when she first visited Cambodia. But she was prepared when an opportunity presented itself, & she was willing to take a risk. Or nine.

Katie O'Shea c. January 2003, Casablanca Bar (Sihanoukville, Cambodia) — the last time I integrated all my interests, which were: Cambodia, talking to people, books, alcohol, art, comics, & being annoyed by a guy named Hunter (who took this photograph).

Now, I don't see myself changing the world by starting a micro-loan organization in a third-world country anytime soon, but I can take some cues from her, from how she used her many talents & skills for something cohesive & ground-breaking. By doing what I love, all of the time, & well, & being prepared, & then entertaining crazy notions at least as long as it takes to see whether they're viable. Then moving forward with them, or throwing them away.

I may be writing fewer e-mails soon. I may write here more, to update people on what I am & am not doing all in one go. Or I may drop off the face of the earth for a short while as I figure all this out. Even that's not sorted. I've got some work to do. But I've got no plans. Not yet.

pace & media

2009-07-22T00:54:00.000-07:00

I've noticed that, now that my profession keeps me on my feet, & now that so many elements of what I do are extremely time-sensitive, to the second, I take much greater advantage of mobile communication. Much of this is because I'm not in front of a computer for 8+ hours a day anymore. (Unless I so choose, such as today, when I easily spent four hours on a computer before work and easily again four hours afterward — but there was a seven-hour gap in between!) And much of it's to do with the media itself changing, offering me faster, broader, richer* ways to communicate with people, near & far.

* Sort of.

But mobile communication being shorter & more cumbersome than other kinds I've been using for twenty years, I wind up being a lot more terse. I play with words less because I have less time & space to play, & the physical action of writing itself is not as fluid. I had hoped I would fill up this space here with all that extra play-time, as though I had some kind of writing quota. Six weeks in, & this is turning out not to be the case. But I'm experimenting (see previous post) with some things flickr lets me do, such as e-mail a photo from the road that'll post straight to here. While I figure most likely it will just make me more terse more often, it may also get me comfortable enough writing on the phone to open the floodgates a little bit there** as well as here (I'm on the PowerBook G4). That, or I'll never use it at all, & I'll merely commit to sitting myself in front of the G4 screen for greater periods of time***, preferably with the internet button switched to "off."

** Not while on bar. Don't be silly.

*** A benefit to devoting time & energy to writing vs. writing on the road is a better articulated, more considered piece of writing at the end. There's only so much nuance of meaning you can jam into 140 characters. I could also just chuck blogging altogether & write more short stories, which you're probably in if you're reading this. I'm kidding! I write fiction, jeez.

Good night,
Katie

testing, one two, one two three, one, one two three, testing

2009-07-22T00:15:00.000-07:00

testing, one two, one two three, one, one two three, testing
Originally uploaded by katiepoche

Testing.

Check-check, one two. One two three.

Check.

::Written on the road::

bike job

2009-07-13T06:30:00.001-07:00

BIKE JOB: WHAT I PLANNED

• Break chain, release rear derailleur, remove brakes, pedals, shifters, crankset, cogs (keep in tub @BRW).
• Strip bike of paint: "Circa 1850" Heavy Body paint & varnish remover (spray & gel).
• Clear-coat or otherwise seal frame with lube/grease to keep rust out.
• Re-install fork/headset/crankset/handlebars.
• Re-install brakes.
• Assemble wheelset, including tubes & tires. (Does it come with lockring/cog?) (No.)
• Remove extra chain links.
• Roll.

BIKE JOB: WHAT I DID

20090604, BRW:
Remove all parts (brakes, wheels, handlebars, crankset, sprockets, chainrings).
Strip paint on fork, begin stripping paint on frame.
Break chain, remove chain & rear derailleur

20090617, BRW
~~Keep strip~~ping paint. (Halfway done.)
~~Buy lockring & cog.~~

20090625, BRW:
~~Keep stripping paint.~~ (DONE!)

20090711, BRW:
~~Polish, finish up final paint strip.~~
Re-thread bottom bracket.
Clean & re-pack bottom bracket, headset.
Replace spindle.
Remove smaller chainring.
· 46/15t may be too gnarly a gear ratio. Kwan (BRW) suggests using smaller chainring & machining down larger chaining, turning it into a chainguard.
~~Install lockring & cog.~~
~~Install crankset.~~

200907__, BRW:
Patch busted tube.
Install brakes.
Swap out pedal straps, dark brown leather for black nylon.

2009____, Ongoing
Research saddles, bartape, ~~toestraps~~ (dark brown leather).

nevermind about acceptance

2009-07-08T03:23:00.000-07:00

I want what I want, & I'm going to work towards what I want until I get it. And what I want is the paint off. If I have to sand- or ball-blast the frame to make that happen, then that is what I will do.

That is all. Everything else shall remain as I wrote it. Um. With edits.

Love,
Katie

puch it up!

2009-06-26T14:28:00.000-07:00

I've been slowly working on a "new" bike, in the background, when I'm not at the shop. It's made by Puch, an Austrian manufacturing company that once made cars, bikes, mopeds, and motorcycles. (I also heard they made lawn mowers & chainsaws, but that has not been verified.) Now, they just make bikes. Estimates by those who purport to know put this bike as manufactured in the early '80s.

The bike was a gift from Tony Sem, back when the eponymous Nishiki was stolen off the front of a bus. Grateful as I am, and love it as I do, the bike is pretty hard to describe as anything but a beater. A cerulean-blue paint job, chipped, revealed a lighter, aqua-blue underneath. The seat stays had broken at some point & been welded back together. Mysteriously, every element of the frame (top tube, bottom tube, seat tube, rear stays, even the fork) had scotch tape on it, somewhere. As though scotch tape would do ... something.

What the.

Now, I like bikes. I like fixing them up to my specs, & I like the challenge of turning something modest into something interesting. So I was looking into ways to make this bike something other than a beater. Then I ran into Ephraim at LA Brakeless while I was shopping for parts. He & I chatted about wheelsets & cogs, what gear ratio I hoped to run, & the not-particularly-to-my-liking paint job. He mentioned stripping & powdercoating it. Stripping a bike of paint is either cheap (if you sand- or ball-blast it) or very cheap (if you use harsh chemicals & fervor). Something about taking off the paint myself appealed to me. I don't know. I can be stubborn & foolish. Ask anyone I've ever dated, ever, and they will tell you this is true.

Three rounds of scrubbing the thing with incredibly harsh chemicals later, and the frame is finally, mostly, clean of the blues. Interesting: It's a gun-metal-grey steel frame under all that. The lugged frame was brazed together using a brass-colored metal that fades & streaks nicely into the gun-metal. And then there's the issue of the paint. I will never get absolutely all that paint off. Currently, it's flecked with the cerulean blue, a detail I'm not really all that sad about. While the idea of not painting the bike a different color had come up once I discovered the lovely gun-metal-grey beneath, I've since decided to clear-coat it as is, flecks & all. [NB: Fuck the paint. I had an idea for this bike, & it didn't involve flecks of cerulean blue, I'll tell you what. I gave up too easily on that one.] Unexpectedly, it's going to be a pretty nice-looking bike, indeed. Pictures to come after my next trip to BikeRoWave, assuming I remember to take them.

Serendipity. ~~Acceptance.~~ Hard work & mirth. Something. I just get the feeling I'm going to like the hell outta this bike, especially after I kit it up with the components I want: Brooks honey saddle with matching bartape & toe straps, or Brooks dark brown saddle with matching toe straps & shellacked brown cloth bartape.

That's it, pals. See you on the road.

Love,
Katie

2009-06-25T00:57:00.000-07:00

Whoah, hey! Hello. Last time I saw you here ... well, a lot has happened.

We had the Preview Party, which was surreal. A line around the block for the opening of a coffee bar. Actually. Then, the building had some inspections to pass, which was ... time-consuming & hard for everyone, probably least of all for us trainees (& most of all for, say, Mass Architecture, the technical specialists Nick & Paul & Jim, the construction crews, & of course Tim & Kyle & Doug). Nicely & I got caught out by Doug Zell having "happy hour" beers after an early-morning training session (ending at 3pm) ... which was embarrassing. It's just a very early hour to be so happy.

THEN WE OPENED.

And then the real excitement began.

Not like how this is exciting — totally different. This is bad-exciting. What I'm talking about is good-exciting.

Previous to this madness, we had trained for 9 weeks. We learned about a very many aspects of the industry: History, perception (taste & smell & touch, if mouthfeel could be described as touch), language, agriculture, agronomy, botany, chemistry, physics. Why we make latté art & what it signifies. Our (written) final exam was 16 pages long, & it was completely independent of our practical exam, which (ideally) lasts 18 minutes & (not ideally) lasts less than that.

But the funny thing about training is, it doesn't matter how long you train. There's nothing like the real thing, much as dress rehearsal has some bearing on performance but it's just ... not ... performance, or how working on a draft is very different from putting Rotring to mylar. Same steps. Different*. Added to the general rehearsal-is-not-performance analogy is the fact that we're doing things differently, even from other Intelligentsia coffee bars. The process. The flow of traffic, for lack of a better word. The whole experience from the customer's point of view. Introducing the all of it, sometimes to people merely curious about an open gate, sometimes to people outright suspicious, all the while not breaking the flow in making coffee (& with a quickness) is hard to rehearse. It's an interesting challenge, & one we get better at every day.

It's also one we hope we won't have to improve upon too much; as we gain the trust of the true Venice natives, as we demonstrate this unusual new flow does indeed make a lot of sense, as we talk & brew & pour & talk & brew & talk some more & brew & pour, people will get it, in time. I know it. And much as I love talking to people (& lemme tell you, I really love talking to people), this future time I see in my head is an exciting time to think about.

Love,
Katie

* Our man Tyler referred to training as the Prologue & the actual opening of the shop as Chapter One. It's apt. More on Chapter 1 later, though. You look tired.

one week, three blisters

2009-05-31T22:29:00.000-07:00

Friday, at the Intelligentsia Venice "Preview Party," my hand slips off a gaewan lid, & I pour 202ºF water onto my hand. An enormous blister forms on my left index finger immediately. (Iron Goddess of Mercy, not so much.)

Cut to the following Thursday when the wheelset arrives for the bike I'm building, & I chuck some innertubes and tires on those rims with a quickness. On my thumbs, soft & pink from lack of wrenching, I got two more blisters.

Bikes & tea, folks. Dangerous stuff.

1: Gaewan mishap.
2, 3: Tire install boo-boos.

two rules

2009-05-28T16:14:00.000-07:00

The Intelligentsia Venice party was Friday. There were some times leading up to it when we looked around at each other & thought "Wow ... There's no fucking way we're going to pull this off."

Then, we pulled it off.

The lesson: Trust Leonard E. Bernstein.

No, just kidding. The real lesson is something I learned in Wieden+Kennedy 12, in which there were exactly two rules:

Keep your work tight. I mean, like, really really tight. Keep your eye on the prize, & care a lot about what you do, & have lofty goals, & take great pains to achieve them. Maybe be an iconoclast. Something to think about.
But don't be a jerk about it.

Everybody's human, fighting great battles, trying their best but with their own understanding of what "best" is, which might not be yours.
You're human, too, and you might fuck up, so you might consider getting over yourself. Everyone else already has.
Collaborating is cool. Sometimes. We collaborated while studying & practicing drink construction.
After you collaborate & think hard, together, then go back in there & work harder & suck it up & don't start shit. Now is the time to be open to some hierarchy & authority in the service of accomplishing goals.

Anyway, I write now not really to tell people what to do, even though I kind of just did. (I find that stuff helpful, but it's certainly not the only way to go about things.) Mostly, I write to take an opportunity to swear more than is strictly necessary (hey Mom). And I write to compile some information about the shop, to lay out what we've all been aiming towards during this insanely insane process. And why I'm such a fan of where I work and its people. And to relay my excitement about continuing to work hard and be nice to people in the shop, both co-workers and customers alike. So:

SOME LINKS ABOUT THE SHOP
Intelligentsia's own write-up about the endeavor, from the Intelligentsia website.
The Intelli.LA blog about all things Intelligentsia in Los Angeles.
A write-up of how the shop will function, from the Los Angeles Times.
An interesting story about one of the espresso machines, from the New York Times.

SOME LINKS ABOUT INTELLIGENTSIA, AS A COMPANY, AND ITS LEVEL OF AWESOME, WHICH IS HIGH
A little about Direct Trade. (Clicking on "CRITERIA," "TRAVEL," & "FAQ" just below the image yields more information.)
How we get our coffee. (There's "BUYING," "CUPPING," & "ROASTING & PRODUCTION" sections, too.)
And this is pretty cool:

SOME PHOTOGRAPHS
Here are some images of what our training was like, from wonderfully talented photographer & art nerd Phillippé Kim. WK12 people, if you're out there: Phill is our Young Guy with the Fresh Perspective. He's also Korean, but he was born in Brazil. WTF.

AND FINALLY
An article on the opening party itself, which features me to an inordinate degree, from the LA Weekly.

Some people (what's up, Dad) have expressed confusion as to why I would cancel a bike trip to Austin, put the brakes on half-formed plans to move to San Francisco, & withdraw 24 (!) applications to advertising agencies in favor of a whole new industry. I hope this helps explain some of that. Kind of like how I left my boyfriend (sorry Steve), quit architecture, & moved to Portland for WK12: I had been given the opportunity to change the way things are done, for the better. To some things, you just don't say no.

Love,
Katie

harvey hetland: one year later

2009-05-04T23:53:00.001-07:00

About a year ago, Harvey Hetland, a well-loved mathematics professor, died in a hit-and-run accident in the middle of the goddamned day, up on La Tuna Canyon Road. He was one of the LA Wheelmen, a kickass group of cyclists who could teach me a thing or nineteen about hill climbing.

Some riders put together a ghost bike — a memorial for a rider downed. There are varying degrees of political stridency behind putting up a ghost bike; in our case, we only felt compelled to mark the passing of someone wonderful. My involvement in the project was the design and painting of the sign (I made a stencil & then hand-painted) & getting the flowers together (they're an assortment of plastic flowers from a 99¢ shop, spray-painted white, grey, & purple, then tied to the front wheel).

[NB: Out of deference for the other participants' privacy, I have not included their names here. But their involvement was the procurement of the bike itself, the painting of the frame, wheels, and components pure white, delivering it to the location, and devising an effective way to secure it at the location.]

Here's a photograph of the bike the day it was installed:

My friend Greg Thomas went up & took these beautiful photographs. He sent them around today, on the one-year anniversary of Harvey Hetland's memorial ride with the LA Wheelmen (Harvey's riding group).

It has aged well. And Harvey, you are missed.

Love,
Katie

plan

2009-05-04T22:29:00.000-07:00

I'm not a huge fan of citing cute, pithy sayings say with an eye towards ratcheting up mojo, but this has been running through my head all week:

"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time." — Leonard Effing Bernstein.

Sounds like a greeting card. Dear Lenny: Dude.

For the next couple weeks, us Intelligentsia trainees will be finishing up our certification exams, perfecting our craft on the Synessos, learning how to use the insanely elegant POS system (which includes a leather case that is TOTALLY OLD-TIMEY/NEW-TIMEY and I love it), getting new skinny jeans & black Vans, and anything & everything else needed to get ourselves and the space ready for the opening.

We have a plan. The plan is ticking along nicely. I'm pretty sure everyone would agree that another couple days wouldn't go to waste.

However, and I don't know if you caught this earlier, but Leonard Effing Bernstein said we'd achieve greatness. And I believe him. He was pretty smart.

Love,
Katie

speaking of the world barista championship ...

2009-04-19T15:51:00.001-07:00

The World Barista Championship was this weekend, in Atlanta, GA. The Championship is a crazy, wonderful event — coffee lovers, baristas, importers, roasters, espresso machine manufacturers, and anyone else interested in the business come together to see the best from each country compete.

Intelligentsia had 2009 National Champion Mike Phillips competing, who has a really compelling story. The four-sentence version of Doug Zell's post is this: Mike wasn't supposed to compete in the Nationals, as he hadn't placed in the top three in the Regionals. But he's a tireless and dedicated man, and he wanted to compete anyway. Which he did, which is kind of against policy, but people don't seem to mind that kind of thing so much after you go ahead and win the whole damned competition. Everyone was surprised, and also not surprised at all, and most of all really very proud.

The first round was on Saturday. Finalists were selected based upon the entrants' performance pulling shots of espresso, making cappuccino, and then presenting a signature drink of their own devising. The drink itself is only one part of the presentation. The competitor must also describe his or her development of the drink as well as what the panel of judges can expect to taste. You really have to know your stuff, to justify it and talk about it and back everything up with history and agronomy and taste, and then you really REALLY have to be able to reliably reproduce it in strange conditions (such as, say, a conference hall several thousand miles from where the drink was developed in the first place). It's not easy, and anyone who competes at all must be a master of their craft. I'm talking, like, 33º Scottish Rite type mastery. There is not a heck of a lot of luck involved.

And the results are in, as of this afternoon:

1st Place: Gwilym Davies, United Kingdom
2nd Place: Sammy Piccolo, Canada
3rd Place: Michael Phillips, USA!
4th Place: Colin Harmon, Ireland
5th Place: Lee Jong Hoon, Korea
6th Place: Attila Molnar, Hungary

Congratulations to everyone who competed, most of all to Gwilym Davies for my own personal "Most Sharply Dressed" award, though Lee Jong Hoon gave him a run for his money. What a tie!

i promise

2009-04-19T15:34:00.001-07:00

Intelligentsia Boot Camp is going well. We're ticking right along, taking our certification exams, dialing in, timing, brewing, tasting, steaming, swirling, pouring, and Making It Happen. But it's been a very hard couple weeks.

A lot of personal, bike, and financial bullshit has cluttered my focus. This is a mistake. There's too much on the line. Kyle Glanville, our fearless leader, has given all of us a huge chance at something really very amazing: To work for one of the best companies out there. To learn how to give this carefully-selected, hard-won, perfectly-roasted coffee the attention and care it deserves. And to take it to the final, integral level that turns an already great thing into a really, really-really effing wonderful thing. It's our job to ensure that all the hard work to get that bean to such great heights before it even reaches us is reciprocated with an equal level of care and mastery. We gotta stick the landing.

Nicely (yes, his name is Nicely) once said, "I made a promise to you all before I ever met you." I'm following up his promise with one of my own. I'm putting all that other stuff on hold for a bit — which is difficult; y'all KNOW I love bikes, not to mention dudes & money — and focusing on coaxing all the wonderful, complex, elusive flavors from the bean. I promise this to the farmers, to the roasters, to Kyle, to Tim, to Nicely, to Chris & M'lissa, to the rest of the trainees. To Doug Zell, Emily Mange, Geoff Watts. To Mike Phillips, everyone who competed in the US and World Barista Championships, and a bunch of other people I've never met. And to all of you, when we open up shop. Be sure to say hi.

Love,
Katie

recommendations

2009-04-09T02:29:00.000-07:00

1.) Don't ever say you're excited to do your own design and writing work, ever, because fate will probably give you an opportunity, and it might not be so nice.
2.) Don't allow me to talk about any bikes I may own on this site, ever again. Because every time I do, I go ahead and lose it. Well. In this case it was a theft.
3.) Lock up your bike on the bus rack. Even just PRETEND to lock it, if you can't actually lock to the rack. Lock the wheel to the frame or something in order to keep crimes of opportunity to a minimum.
4.) Don't ride the bus with your bike, if you're me.
5.) But really, it's hard to know which is the real reason for the theft — writing about it or riding the bus. Riding, writing. Perhaps we shall never know.
6.) Read this flier. Post it elsewhere. Help me find my baby. I miss him so much.

Thanks, folks.

Love,
Katie

making stuff, including but not limited to coffee

2009-03-21T14:10:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I alluded to setting up the conditions properly for me to make stuff. One thing I'll be making is coffee. I mean, more than I already do (a half press a day, no more). I'll be making it at Intelligentsia, at their soon-to-be-opened Venice shop.

My introduction to Intelligentsia was with my friend Beth, from Chicago but visiting from Brooklyn, who insisted we drive 15 miles out of our way for it. I didn't understand. She picked up four pounds of beans alongside her brewed coffee (for friends). When I finished my cup, I picked up two pounds (f0r me, me mememmeme ME). Sean Bonner put it well when he said "[...] Intelligentsia will change your entire perspective on what coffee should taste like." Yep. Here's why:

" ... We adhere to the philosophy that the compassionate treatment of people and the environment inevitably yields higher quality. So whether you are enjoying a cup in our store, in your favorite café or restaurant, or in the peaceful confines of your home, we are certain that you will taste the difference that care makes." — Doug Zell, Emily Mange, and Geoff Watts (from the Intelligentsia website)

That's, like, one-thousandth of the Intelligentsia story. But it's the pith. So when I heard they were hiring, back in November, I applied with a quickness. I was too late for that round, but they had some delays. When things got moving again, they still had my resume. YOW.

Us future baristas will go through a rigorous, weeks-long training period at their roasting facilities in Glassell Park. They will teach us all there is to konw about coffee such that we care the hell out of it (more than we already do) so that we care the hell out of preparing it. I'm excited about how much I'll learn and the great people with whom I'll work. And they're doing some REALLY interesting things with interior & industrial design for the joint. Did they start this venture just for me? I think so.

"What the Yirgacheffe, Kate. What about all those years in design & advertising? Are you throwing that all away?" Of course not. I'm used to working 50-, 60-, 70-hour weeks, first at Cook+Fox, then in WK12, then at 72andSunny. I never worked these hours on anyone's urging but my own. I just ... really ... like working a lot, and I tend to choose jobs that reward that. (I come by it honestly; my parents both work hard because they love what they do.) And, I'm one of those freakpots that sleeps 4 or 5 hours a night. I'm going to have a lot more time than I'm used to, and a lot of creative energy, just kinda lying around. I have about six projects lined up.

It sounds like it's going to be pretty great. I will be working very hard (and I know this — I'm not taking the job lightly) for a company I respect and admire. And I'll be making my own stuff, which will also be hard, especially as some of the ideas I have require learning new skills. But I thrive on that momentum. And I can't wait to start.

new old bike

2009-03-14T03:44:00.000-07:00

Also, take a look at this shit-hot Nishiki mixte fixed-gear bike I just got.

Just kidding. I've had it for five years. And I "fixed" it back in January. Swapped in faster wheels (700x23, fixed hub), put on a racing saddle (Brooks, Team Professional), stripped of all the extraneous things I don't need or want (derailleurs, fenders). One more thing to strip, which is the double-chainring crankset. I'm keeping both brakes, as it's a nice Dia Compe set of which I'm quite fond, and I don't want to break up the pair. This is not a trick bike, anyway; it's an old-timey/new-timey crosstown/distance/racing/funbike.

And I love it. My first bike is my perfect bike. And it feels new to me.

[I'll swap the photo for a chainside-out one as soon as ... well, as soon as I take a good one.]

two months

2009-03-14T01:02:00.000-07:00

And nothing written here. I apologize to all my regular readers — both of you. I've been busy.

I revised the chart. I added usage.

Then I sent it around (with cover letters and resumes) to all the agencies I didn't apply to before.

Which was, like, every agency in town, turns out. (I applied for in-house positions and to individual projects before, with some overtures to agencies but not many.)

The next logical step for me after 72 was more agency work, but I avoided it. I applied to any job that wasn't advertising that used my skills. (It was interesting, the gigs I got, and I have some good stories.) And, I moodled around and made some things.

Probably the best compliment I ever got was when WK12 director Jelly Helm called me an impressive weirdo. I've got some smarts and talents, skills and ideas. If I have it, I spend a lot of time planning, making charts, writing stories, fleshing them out, drawing stuff, editing everything, then putting it all down. Then picking it back up. Some advice I got from this same creative director was follow what you do when no one's looking. Which is write/draw/think/plan/edit/put it down/pick it up.

So I'm doing that.

I have a plan for how to realistically do this. I won't talk about the specifics until things are nailed down, but let it be known that you will think I'm fucking nuts. I know this. And I might be. But I might also be happy. And that's important.

Meanwhile, enjoy the chart.

Love,
Katie

... and picking stuff up

2009-01-06T21:39:00.000-08:00

I mean, I'm not jettisoning EVERYTHING.

I've learned some important stuff that maybe I shouldn't jettison. Do you know how important it is to shake the printer toner? I do. What about using DEET? If you're in a third-world country, use DEET. (Or if you work in advertising.)

This, my response to a request for a brief cover letter. My resume followed, though I'm thinking of bulking this page up, making it more informative, and skipping the formal resume altogether.

jettisoning everything

2009-01-05T21:04:00.000-08:00

I'm tossing things I don't use (ever), don't want to use (philosophically), don't enjoy using (viscerally), or otherwise hate.

Well. Hate's a strong word.

THINGS JETTISONED
• A bunch of clothes. Still not done with this. I have yet to tackle shoes, for example. Note: I'm not tossing any woolens. Also note: I'm a 4 or 6 dress, and I'm a 7 shoe. Come on by.

• Things in drawers. If it's been sitting in a drawer for two months or more, out it goes. There are some things-in-drawers I haven't used in the two years I've lived here. Do you like bobby pins? Wallpaper samples? Magazines about books? Call me up. Exceptions: Awards, gifts, books, my passport.

• Things that do only one thing. I favor things that can perform several functions. For example: I would keep a mortar & pestle but lose a spice grinder. Note: I'm not giving away a spice grinder. That was just an example. I would keep a bike (transportation, exercise, awesome) but lose a car. Note: Again, not getting rid of a car. I already did that.

• Things that make me sad because the people making them do horrible things -- to the environment, to its employees, to my sense of aesthetic justice. There's plenty sad out there already, poppets; I don't need more sad. So: less TV and more books. Less iTunes and more LPs. Less corporations and more individuals. There's some crossover (between corporations and LPs, for example). I navigate those on a case-by-case basis.

IT'S JUST THAT I'VE BEEN THINKING
That simpler is better. That things can be simpler. And that one way to simplify is to cull. So.

BY THE WAY
I wrote this in November, saved a draft, then forgot all about it for two months. Its appearance now has nothing to do with the arrival of 2009. I gave up making New Year's Resolutions (& guilt) for Lent in 1999, three years after I'd given up Catholicism (though I liked the idea of Lent). I give things up and Resolve throughout the year these days. However, I've stopped using the word "Lent" or "Resolution." You know. On principle.

Hokay, that's it!

Love,
Katie

hard work

2008-12-14T19:19:00.001-08:00

I just wrote all day long, and now I'm exhausted and hungry and I could use a drink and a nap and some water (I'm currently drinking a lot of water) and I'M TIRED.

Holy shit.

This doesn't feel bad. It doesn't feel bad at all. It's very strange.

wups

2008-12-12T00:50:00.000-08:00

Oh, hello.

ONE DAY after I posted about all the things I've done with my bike, I jumped on an eastbound Wilshire bus, rode to Figueroa, hopped off, checked the address of my friend's birthday, and then noted, calmly, that my bike was missing.

And by "missing" I mean "no longer with me" as in "still on the bus." But it took me a while to realize this; my mind cycled* through assuming someone had stolen it in front of my face, to thinking I had left it unlocked around the corner, to realizing that I had just done something really quite dumb. Then I became significantly less calm.

[* Sorry.]

It takes three days to process items left on the bus. It was late enough that I (and the MTA) consider it lost on Wednesday. Wednesday + 3 + weekend = Monday.

In the meantime, I'm taking the advice of this guy and focusing on the things I can control:

Adding non-advertising work to my design portfolio
Getting better sleep
Changing my health insurance
Replacing these jeans
Flossing

And taking the eponymous Squeaky Nishiki in for a re-fit:

Removing the fenders
Replacing 27" wheels with 700x23 wheels with a fixed hub
Removing the rear cassette
Adding an appropriately-toothed rear cog and lockring
Removing 1 front chainring
Adjusting/replacing brake levers
Removing some chain links
Raising the seat post and replacing the saddle

... But I'm not going crazy with the re-fit. I might leave it on a bus, after all.

new developments on my bike

2008-12-08T12:40:00.000-08:00

In order of appearance:

A couple months back, I bunged up a brake lever. I replaced the pair with in-line levers. (They're housed on either side of the stem, not on the drops.)

Old bartape plus a missing tube plug meant new sets of both. Experimented briefly with white bar tape, but a.) eh and b.) it got filthy in three minutes. Back to black.

I'd been riding with my seat too low. I didn't notice because I was focusing on the difference in riding with drops. A new seat post let me raise that sucker a good three inches, and suddenly I have a lot more power.

I went from 27" wheels with 1.5-inch diameter inner tubes to 700s with 23mm diameter inner tubes. A smaller, thinner wheel gives the frame more space and highlights the fact that it's really quite small (49"). Raising that seat made the bike look downright dainty.

I got the wheelset (or half of it) for doing some work for a fixed-gear shop, and so I was paid in fixed-gear parts. The rear wheel has a flip flop hub. So I flipped it. I'm learning how to trackstand.

New lights. Because when someone points out that those gummy Knog ones look like cystic outgrowths bulging from your seatpost and stem, you can never ever wash that imagery from your mind.

My bottle cage got in the way of hiking my bike onto my shoulder to take it up and down stairs. I've been doing more of that lately, for one reason or another. Off it goes.

My brakes screamed bloody murder. I replaced the brake pads, and now we're good to go ... downhill. (A fixed-gear bike negates the need for brakes, but I'm keeping at least the front one as a backstop. Maybe it's not so hardcore. I'm okay with this.)

And there you have it. It's like a whole new bike.

mind-blowing conversations

2008-12-08T00:49:00.001-08:00

Tim: "Why don't you teach dance?"
Katie: "... Yeah, why DON'T I teach dance?"

I was a dancer, in high school and a little after. A serious dancer. Performing-lead-roles-at-the-age-of-15 serious. Missing-prom serious. I wasn't going to take the SAT because I figured I wouldn't need to. (Then I won a National Merit Scholarship and figured maybe I should.) I quit at 20 to study architecture in New York City, a city with which I had fallen in love during my dance training.

In the spirit of using the whole caribou, so to speak, and forgive me for using the phrase "using the whole caribou," not to mention the phrase "so to speak," wouldn't it be nice to put some of that training to use? I mean crap, I trained for years and at some damned fine schools. And what am I doing with that? Nothing. Wasteful, really. And selfish.

Thanks, Tim, for pointing that out. No really. You're awesome.

(He is.)

kittenwar

2008-11-06T13:37:00.000-08:00

Hello.

I've been surly, brethren and sistren. Very surly. Mostly about voting lameness, alleycats, underemployment, and California's failure to grant basic civil rights to people based on who those people choose to love.

That's so gay.

But! This is not the first time I've been surly, oh, no. As such, I'm prepared. I have weapons in my arsenal. I have strategies and tactics. I have resources and support.

I have kittenwar.

Seriously. After five minutes of kittenwar, the world really does look like a better place. A place with kittens, and cameras, and a little basic code. If I live in a world where kittenwar can exist, there is hope.

May the cutest kitten win.

vote

2008-11-05T16:32:00.000-08:00

N O V E M B E R 2

November 2 was election day in 2004. The shirt I'm wearing in this photo (actually an iron-on) was part of a grass-roots, non-partisan, get-out-the-vote campaign, and the agency was none other than wee, scrappy Wieden+Kennedy 12. (Which is a school. Well. An agency disguised as a school. OK OK, an experiment disguised as an agency, disguised as a school, Ow, my head.) I wear the shirt every election day, local or national, because I believe that people, speaking together, as one voice, can make big change.

Kind of like what happened yesterday.

Also yesterday, debate raged about whether it's okay to tell undecided/uninformed voters how to vote on local measures on the day of the election, the idea being you're helping them by introducing them to the political process.

N O P E

If you don't have opinions about issues on the ballot, and if you take someone else's suggestions without researching them, you are essentially letting that person vote for you, which is not the same as voting. It's a lazy, complacent simulation of voting, and you then have the false sense that you're participating in the democratic process. Voting is harder than that. Voting SHOULD be harder than that. Voting should take time. Time with the voter information booklet, a computer for further research, and pencil and paper. Because you'd be surprised at how your opinion might differ vastly from people you know very well. And there's no real shortcut to finding that out other than research and discussion.

M E A N W H I L E

Telling someone else how to vote without references or citations is arrogant, condescending, and self-serving. Nobody has the authority to tell someone else how to vote, without engaging in discussion or debate, on the day of the election. No body. Doing so is not helpful to anyone but yourself -- you're making your vote count more times than you are allowed. I remind you: You are allowed exactly one (1) vote.

In the olden days, if you got other people to vote the way you wanted them to, you usually had to pay them, and it was called "vote buying," and it was illegal. And it was not a true reflection of the will of the people. Which is

the entire

point

of voting.

T H E R E F O R E

If you're thinking of voting: Read. Debate. Listen. Think. Debate some more. Then go to the polls. Draw the curtains. And vote. But really vote, yeah? Don't vote blindly, or half-vote. Because voting with ignorance, apathy, sloth, and blind faith is far more dangerous than not-voting with ignorance, apathy, sloth, and blind faith.

If you're thinking of telling impressionable, undecided, lazy people how to vote: Don't. Just ... fucking ... don't.

Thank you, and good night.

finish

2008-11-03T19:01:00.000-08:00

Saturday, I helped my friend Shannon host an alleycat. Here are some of the spokecards, "designed" in roughly ten minutes, by yours truly. The theme was "scary, scary things."

Alleycats are hard on racers. 20-25 miles through the city, and you don't know the checkpoints til you start, and you have to do things at each checkpoint. Fun ... but hard. (A more thorough run-down of how they work is buried in this post about LA Brakeless' opening party. But they're also hard on planners. The planner has to research routes, organize props at the checkpoints, organize people at the checkpoints, figure out the party at the end, and otherwise keep everyone on track and on time. Which is hard with bikers. "Like herding cats."

So when only five people showed up on Saturday, it was a little disappointing. But we weren't fussed; everyone was full of candy and hangover, and even the racers looked tired. Much more disappointing was when three out of five racers decided not to finish. Decided -- didn't blow out a tire or bust an ankle or accidentally get on the freeway. (It happens .... ) Sat on their saddle and thought, "eh." One rider (I won't call him a racer) decided not to finish because his friend didn't finish. Actually!

If you say you're coming to an alleycat, then come to an alleycat, and be prepared to ride a goddamned alleycat. If you're too cool to try, to be seen caring for anything or exerting some fucking effort, then you might as well just walk up before the race begins and ask for the DFL prize.

You might as well ask. But you won't get it, because you won't have earned it. DFL is for finishers.

Now, get offa my lawn!

this guy was pretty smart

2008-11-02T22:43:00.000-08:00

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

-- Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass: By the Roadside (1855)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I think I've been ranging columns. Goddammitt, Walt! Just ... goddammitt.

freelance vs. nolance

2008-10-25T19:41:00.001-07:00

I've been lookin' for work lately, and it's been a long process. I'm doing a couple side projects while I search, and the more I do this, the more I wonder if I need (or even want) a long-term, full time gig. There's something awfully nice about being able to do what I want for a couple days, whether that "what I want" is drawing, writing, loading up on 1930s UFA films, traveling, or ... watching ... more 1930s UFA films.

And it's come to the attention of everyone who uses money that the economy's for shit at the moment. So employers are less likely to hire someone on as a salaried employee, anyway. Which means I might be in the perfect spot to freelance. I certainly amn't going to thank any stars that my 401(K) won't cover my credit card debt, but said shitty economy might help me get a freelance gig that otherwise wouldn't be freelance. So yay.

The other option, as proposed by some dude from Ohio, is to get a job, not necessarily in my previous career path, and spend my off time (which I will have, because I don't sleep, which worked out well for me in advertising) doing what it is that I do. Drawing, writing, drawing-and-writing, makin' stuff. Fearsome! This option has a very strong appeal, despite the fearsomeness, which is to say I just might do it. Wondering if I HAVE to do it, now that I've written it down and now that I've told you three about it. Now that I've climbed the ladder to the diving board.

In sum: No ad-job means some other job means doing what I really want until what I really want pays. I find myself chasing a dream I didn't realize I had. It's almost as though the universe is conspiring to get me to do what really makes me happy. And that's neat.

Thanks, universe. I owe you one.

competitive cycling

2008-10-22T07:09:00.000-07:00

If I ride bikes like an asshole, and don't wait for my slower biking friends, and pass people every chance I get just to see if I can, can I put down that I'm a "competitive cyclist" on my resume?

Yeah?

OK cool.

exciting julys

2008-10-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

Weird stuff happens to me in July. I used to think July was unlucky or something, but this last one got me thinking maybe no. Here are six things in five Julys over 11 years:

JULY 1997
I decided not to pursue a career in classical and contemporary ballet after 13 years of training and performance. This was not an incident but a decision -- it didn't happen to me, I happened to it. It was hard. It was the right decision. No luck involved.

JULY 2001
A summer job at an architectural antiques showroom was cut short when the building fell down owing to dodgy construction. The owner had not gotten the proper permits and, in fact, had been told to cease construction twice. During the collapse, I was on the roof (which was unaffected). I was supposed to be on the 3rd floor (which was very much affected and would have meant a three-story drop alongside and under marble mantlepieces, ceramic bathtubs and sinks, and glass chandeliers). After I gave my statement to the police, I stopped to get a cup of coffee, realized I'd left my bag (with my wallet and paycheck in it) on the roof, broke down into tears, and discovered that the person behind me in line was a psychologist specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder. My aunt, herself recovering from a spiral fracture in her femur, said I was the luckiest person she knew.

JULY 2004
After being in Cambodia for over a year (drawing comics, tending a bar I co-owned, and freelance architectural drafting), the Assistant District Attorney of New York rang me up. He was finally bringing the building-collapse case to court. (The original court date was scheduled for September 12th, 2001, a.k.a. The Day After 9/11, in the courthouse across the street from the World Trade Center.) In a third-world country with limited phone and e-mail access on the other side of the world, I was the only employee they could find. "Where the hell did the other ones go?" I asked the D.A.. It got me thinking about going back to the States and provided the beginning of an exit strategy. I told them that I would testify if they would pay my airfare to New York. They agreed. Lucky.

JULY 2004
On a four-hour taxi ride from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville, Cambodia, the driver fell asleep at the wheel. The taxi hit a guard rail, flipped forward twice, and landed right-side-up again. I was in the passenger seat with no functional seat belt. The seven (7) people in the back seats were not injured; they were packed in too tightly to have room to bang around. I broke my arm, fractured my shoulderblade, and broke two toes, one of which was later amputated. On my flight back to the States, already booked for the court appearance, I got an automatic upgrade to first class, which was 14 hours of loveliness on Thai Airways. But I should never have agreed to travel four hours in a car with no functional seatbelt in the first place. No luck involved.

JULY 2005
Will, my sister's ex-boyfriend and at one time my good friend, died of a drug overdose at the very end of the month (he was found in the first days of August). I was sad and angry. This complicated, brilliant, troubled person who had acted very, very badly towards my sister, the sister who is my hero, who has saved my ass on many occasions, who is smarter and kinder and more everything than I will ever be ... he was suddenly a saint. And I couldn't tell him how mad I was, hold him accountable for all the shit he'd pulled in the last months of his life. HOW DARE HE. No luck involved.

JULY 2008
I went on vacation. An old friend confessed his undying affection. I was laid off after two years to the day. I went to the ER with a kidney infection. All this happened in the space of two weeks. (The undying affection did die, after I pointed out we have nothing in common, including but not limited to values, humor, tastes.) It forced me to re-assess what I do, what I'm good at doing, what I want to do, and where. And why. Still doing all of that, especially the "what I want to do" part. Good luck, mostly, though I can't say anything good at all about a kidney infection.

Five Julys, six incidents. Three were lucky, and three were luckless -- neither lucky nor unlucky. I netted out lucky, and I have some good stories. I think I'm ready for some boring Julys, though. Maybe for a long time.

what i would have twittered: flight edition

2008-10-01T15:40:00.001-07:00

WHAT I WOULD HAVE TWITTERED, IF I COULD HAVE TWITTERED, ON FLIGHT #6084 FROM PORTLAND TO LOS ANGELES ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26TH, 2008:

"This plane is smaller than the plane I took to Portland back in July. And that plane was totally wee."

"This plane is full of golfers. Or people who want to look like golfers. Giant golfers. #weeplane"

"Dude. I can't believe I scheduled a flight during the Obama/McCain debates. DUDE."

"O, grate! Loud-talker immediately behind me has decided to give life advice to his row-mate."

"Ever decide you just don't like someone on very little evidence? I do. #lifeadviceguy"

"My iPhone thinks I really REALLY like the following bands: Copy, Pistolera, The Dismemberment Plan (always with the Plan!), El-P."

"Turns out Christopher and I have nothing in common, including but not limited to values, humor, tastes. Go figure."

"Feels like wheels of plane made contact with tarmac, yet we're several thousand feet above ground. Worrisome?"

"When I decide to cut my hair, I want it cut nownow, so I often cut it myself. Want to cut it now. Resisting cutting in airplane bathroom."

"#lifeadviceguy taught Mexican row-mate to say 'yes' like an American (i.e., not 'tchess' but 'yes'). Life advice guy really proud of him."

"Actually plugging my ears so as to not hear #lifeadviceguy. Plane taxiing = no portable music devices allowed."

"It's hot and humid, and everyone has perfect teeth, and I'm within 20 minutes of my bike, and I smell doughnuts. It's good to be home."

work values

2008-09-29T18:54:00.000-07:00

I'm going to kick this off by stating that this is not a post about my feelings; it's a post about what helps me make good work. The following things will set the conditions properly for making good work, which is something I ... well, feel very strongly about. Dammitt, I guess it is about my feelings.

WHAT MAKES GOOD STUFF:

COLLABORATION
My idea might be great, but maybe you can help find a better medium for it. Or vice versa. Or maybe it's not that readily broken down -- we both just make our ideas better. The point is, you'll see stuff I won't, I'll see stuff you won't, and the end result is better work. And that's what we're trying to do. Right?

HAPPY PEOPLE
If individuals (or the whole office, god forbid) is caustic, or apathetic, or inflexible, or defensive, bad work will come out of it. The work will reflect the ethos of the place where it's made. Smile, motherfuckers. And mean it.

OPEN SPACE
The free exchange of ideas is reinforced by wide open spaces where you can let unexpected influences leak in, make a suggestion to a colleague, or bounce an idea off someone without having to walk down a corridor or clutter their in-box. It's a messier and less precious way of working, and it's kind of amazing.

ACCOUNTABILITY
This isn't school, and this isn't a place for me to work on my fantasy portfolio & get paid at the same time. If the work is beautiful but no one understands the message, then it's a failure. If the work gets negative attention, that's also a failure. Does it follow the WK12 test of interesting/relevant/true? Yes? Good.

THE RIGHT SIZE
Medium-sized. Like, 50-150 people.

MONEY
Only I can bring what I bring. Hire me for the whole package, with writing, and design, and biking, and ballet, and comic books, and bartending experience in it. Go ahead and use all of it (yes, I'll mix you drinks). And then make it clear that you value all of it (ka¢hing). That'd be stellar.

GOOD MEETINGS
Meetings get bad press because most meetings are bad. So, like, they earned the bad press. But there's such a thing as a good meeting. A good meeting has minutes, and agendas, and open dialogue, and yelling, and laughing, and doughnuts. Yelling + pastries ... now that's a good meeting.

DOUGHNUTS
Did I mention doughnuts? Seriously. Give me some doughnuts.

TRUST
If I have an idea that changes the brief, and I can support it, trust that I'm not doing so idly or for my own wily purposes. Allow me to present two versions -- the version that sticks to the brief like a barnacle, and my version. Am I asking you for permission to do more work? Yes, I am.

Those are the mains. Pretty much everything else is negotiable. "Doughnuts aren't negotiable?" you ask. How can I put this more clearly? I am going to need some doughnuts. That is all.

Love,
Katie

C.R.A.N.K. MOB taught me: los angeles is good for biking

2008-09-21T20:34:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my first-ever group ride in Los Angeles. That ride was C.R.A.N.K. MOB.

I hated biking in LA when I first moved here. I was bad at it. I'd moved from a city with three bike shops in every neighborhood to a city with more, bigger neighborhoods and fewer shops. I rarely saw other bikers on the road. Those I saw were mostly road racers, and I didn't have much in common with them. But I did enjoy it for its own sake, whether I had a community behind me or not, and I did learn more about bikes on my own, mostly by necessity. Then I found out about Midnight Ridazz from a co-worker who saw me bike in to work. (Thanks, Kristy.)

We went on that first C.R.A.N.K. MOB together, and I was stunned. It implanted in me the desire to be better, stronger, and faster. It shook the complacency right out of me, as suddenly I was exposed to a much bigger variety of kinds of bikes, of bikers, than previously. I saw how much more there was to know.

Over time, the more rides I went on, the more I rode to work, I got stronger. I got to know the city better. My sense of direction became a little less appalling. I could take care of basic repairs on my own. And my speed, hill-climbing, and handling skills improved. And C.R.A.N.K. MOB had a lot to do with it, alongside Midnight Ridazz and Los Angeles itself (all those longer distances and far-apart bike shops had a lot to do with my learning curve). For these, I'm grateful.

Thanks, C.R.A.N.K. MOB, and happy birthday.

LAB grand opening #2

2008-09-20T06:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (Saturday, Sept. 20) was the SECOND grand opening -- "Because one opening just isn't enough" -- of fixed-gear and track bicycle shop Los Angeles Brakeless.

They did swift business at their former location in Culver City which opened in November 2007. But when a vintage store went out of business at Venice Boulevard and Grand View, owners Anna and Dave saw an opportunity to move to a location with higher visibility and more street traffic. Other, complementary businesses in the area include a coffee shop, an art gallery, a used book shop, a tattoo parlor, and a costume store (if you've ever been on C.R.A.N.K. MOB, you'll know the importance of a good costume shop on the westside). All it needs is a repair co-op, and it could challenge Heliotrope and Melrose's distinction as Los Angeles' "bicycle district."

The opening-day celebrations were launched with an alleycat race -- a multi-stop event where the racers only find out the checkpoints moments before the race begins. Racers choose the order in which they make the circuit of the checkpoints, and one checkpoint demanded that racers take a large package with them for the remainder of the race. The requirements that the racers know surface streets well and be able to ride quickly with a large package strapped to their back were nods to the race form's messenger-style beginnings. Below are the front and back of the alleycat spoke cards and manifest (both designed by me).

hunting & gathering

2008-09-02T17:14:00.000-07:00

Gentle readers, some of you may know that I've been on a nearly two month hiatus from work during which time I went on a trip, became very ill, then left 72andSunny (where I'd worked for two years to the day!). During the 6 weeks I've been back in Los Angeles, I've been compiling work into a portfolio, something I had never bothered to do, and enjoying all that westside Los Angeles in the summertime has to offer, something I told myself I didn't have time to do. So that's the gathering part. Now it's time to hunt.

I've posted my resume at the bottom of this post. And here are some work examples from my time at 72andSunny. In addition to the hunting I'm doing myself, I invite y'all to take a look, tell me what you think, pass it around to anyone you know who might be looking. In the meantime, I'll post here about how the rest of my job search is going. It's an interesting process, very revealing about what I value, what I want, what I need out of a job. I'm looking forward to finding out where I wind up.

And just because it's been a bit of a habit lately, I'd like to give a shoutout to the awesome Tek for his very good advice. Mostly about milkshakes.

root beer floats

2008-08-31T23:54:00.000-07:00

My good friend Tek, one who tosses off spot-on advice on a regular basis, recently mentioned root beer floats in a night-out tweet. It reminded me of a period of several days when some bike-riding friends of mine (did I mention I ride bikes?) were planning a ride on the freeway during rush hour traffic. "If you rode a bike, you'd be home by now." People wore capes.

Debate raged about the ride's legality, which is absurd. Naysayers suggested skipping the ride entirely, and Yaysayers (or Sayers) looked for loopholes and suggested playing dumb. But why play dumb? This was my response:

I suffer from infrequent, short-lived, and severe bouts of insomnia. Once every three or four months, couple days. They give me very lucid dreams when I finally sleep, and then I remember the dreams very well. I dreamt about this ride last night. We fought up until the second we got on the freeway, but then the ride went without a hitch. Very slow traffic meant lots of weaving, lots of waving, lots of startled people but little anger. More like disbelief followed by honking and nervous laughter and even some cheering. Then, "If you rode a bike you'd be home by now!" and they were less cheerful. Then traffic picked up, and cars could actually move to the side to let cop cars through, and they did, and we hightailed it outta there. Then we got root beer floats. Well. I'm not sure if the root beer floats part was the same dream, or the next dream. But we should consider them. They were really good.

I'm being flip. But I'm also being serious. Yes, there are dangers, and most likely it will not happen as smoothly as I dreamt. Drivers will be mad, and maybe aggressive and confused, and they'll probably call the cops on us if the cops aren't already waiting. People will probably get arrested. I, not being the fastest rider on this thread, will probably get arrested. It's more a matter of whether or not I'm willing to accept getting arrested or not. People on this thread have gotten arrested for far less.

But think about it. Do you want to have it on your record that you got arrested for biking on the Santa Monica Freeway? I do. It's absurd and delicious and perfect, and it makes my nose tingle, and it makes me laugh, just like a root beer float. Of course I want that.

I think they must have been the same dream.

The results of the ride were a lot of hooting and hollering, mixed reactions (but a lot of support) from motorists, one law-enforcement warning (footage of the cape-wearing rider getting that warning at the end of this video), and no tickets. Some riders went out for root beer floats afterwards.

And I still want that ticket.

the not-so-secret girls-that-kick-ass club

2008-08-26T18:13:00.000-07:00

My friend Tek recently commented that fellow lady biker Shannon and I must be part of a secret girls-that-kick-ass club, unafraid of putting our buffness into action. I was surprised, as I never thought of myself as in-your-face about my physical strength -- there's not very much of it, for one, and that which I have is fallout from biking rather a lot. In contrast, if I became strong because of a conscious effort to become strong (with weights, say), then maybe I would be more proud of it.

But I was also surprised at the implication that anyone would be afraid of putting their buffness into action. Physical prowess may not be the defining feature of femininity, but if you've got it, hiding it seems odd. Especially since, in general, it's considered to be very positive. It would never occur to me to hide my physical strength.

But lady bikers might be an odd breed -- none of my biking pals would blink at outpacing a guy if she could, would bike slowly to stave off sweating, would shy away from a hill. The results are not only such unladylike things as sweat, strength, and speed, but also safety -- the more conspicuous you are, at any speed or strength, the less likely you are to get hit. Not putting buffness into action (being tentative, biking slowly in car traffic, being unable to control your bike) is downright bad biking. And it's more important to us to be good bikers than it is to be dainty. (That's not to say we don't clean up good.)

So maybe Tek's right -- perhaps I do belong to a girls-that-kick-ass club. However, it's not very secret. We're right there in the open, every day, in the streets and in the bike lanes. And we'd love it if you joined us. But try to keep up.

the cambodian disabled volleyball team is not afraid of you and it will beat your ass

2008-08-13T21:33:00.000-07:00

[ WARNING: This post has nothing to do with bikes. ]

Some of you know that I spent some time in Cambodia. My sister went long: She spent over 5 years in the country, during which time she co-founded a grassroots micro-loan organization primarily benefiting disabled people. So I've got some insights into the country that I wouldn't otherwise have.

_ In Cambodia, a citizen can't hold office if she or he has a disability of any kind;
_ The Cambodian landscape is still littered with unexploded land mines, & the disability rate is thus much higher than average;
_ The children of Cambodia's Civil War (1970-1975) -- many of whom are disabled too -- have grown up, and many of them have children of their own to support;
_ It's sanctioned by law to pay disabled people less than able-bodied people, even if their disability doesn't affect their work.

So it's pretty damned amazing to hear a story like this. The Cambodian National Volleyball Team, whose members are all disabled, is ranked third in the world. The prize money they earned from one of their recent conquests was equivalent to two years' salary for every team member. Dude. That's the best lemonade I've heard of in a long, long time.

[From GOOD Magazine.]

oakland + portland = <3land

2008-07-03T08:18:00.000-07:00

Hello, my friends.

July 4th-7th:
I'm coming to San Francisco to spend some time with my sister, the indomitable Deirdre O'Shea. I'll be staying in Oakland, with side trips east and west to Orinda and San Francisco. Come out and we can play.

July 7th -10th:
Monday, I'm flying to Portland. I will eat local, sustainable, organic food that was made by culinary artisans. I will drink coffee brewed with spring water and the souls of the innocent. I will drink some other things, too. There will be field trips to Wieden + Kennedy, Holocene, and Valentine's. Come out and PLAY, I said!

July 10th-13th:
Then, the fun begins. Caroline and I are driving back down to SF, taking the scenic route. There's noise of camping. I'll re-enter San Francisco at some point, but I don't know when. Then my bike and I will head back south again on the train. I'm thinking I'll wear that long brown skirt, the lace-fronted shirt, and a cloche hat. I mean, it's a train. I should dress appropriately.

July 14th onward:
Los Angeles. Storm the Bastille, then COME OUT AND PLAY!

I hope to see you soon. In whichever city you live.

Katie

This is how I'll look, biking around San Francisco, with like some flowers and an anvil. (Not really.)

*** UPDATE! ***
Photos from the trip here.

haiku

2008-05-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

They had me writing Valentine's Day haiku for a thing at work. It's a little late (or way early), but go ahead and take a read.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Valentine's Day is
kind of a weird holiday.
Sexy saint. Okay.

I don't like this day
any more than I like its
initials: V.D.

Flowers, chocolates, cards,
a fancy sit-down dinner.
No no no. Diamonds.

For someone who just
biked thirteen miles to see me,
you smell awfully nice.

This bar would be less
heartbreakingly depressing
if you weren't in it.

There's a tear in my
beer cause I'm crying for you dear....
Nah. I'm glad you're gone.

Why do birds sudden-
ly appear every time you
are near? Let's have sex.

You fart, you kick my
cat, your dad owes me money.
Will you marry me?

I remember how
you always frowned in your sleep.
I really miss you.

My one and only:
Sit with me, my beloved.
We have Syphillus.

We have herpes we
have herpes we have herpes
we still have herpes.

Scabies cookie.

someday, i will master the reply-all button

2008-05-16T00:53:00.000-07:00

From: Alex P.
To: The Zune Team + a couple other people

"Monster Tears" is now called "Tickle Party."
It’s official. Everyone agreed.
72 and The Client approved the change.

. . . . . . . .

From: Katie O'S.
To: The Zune Team + a couple other people

TICKLE PARTY TICKLE PARTY CCKKLY EPART TICKLEY PARYT AALTICKEL PARTYPICITLEYPARTY TICKLEY AOTRTY!!@$!!!!

. . . . . . . .

From: Charlie S.
To: Katie O'S.

You are my fucking hero.

. . . . . . . .

From: Katie O'S.
To: Charlie S.

No, you.

. . . . . . . .

From: Katie O'S.
To: Charlie S.

I just realized that The Client was also on that e-mail.

. . . . . . . .

Oopsie.

< hey! >

2008-04-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

Hanako. Hey hey, Hanako.

Song lyrics.

apparently i have a crush on bekah

2008-04-29T17:15:00.000-07:00

This is one thing I drew in today's series of meetings.

"Bekah is fucking gorgeous," it says. Sorry, Shannon.

things i like finding in pockets

2008-04-23T13:52:00.000-07:00

Ten dollars.
Three dollars in change [ + ten dollars = 13 dollars! ].
Chapstick. CHERRY chapstick. Leads to singing. You know the song.
A Muji eraser I thought I lost.
Directions to a friend's going-away party. Happy/sad.
Did I mention ten dollars?

That's two fives.

happy earth day

2008-04-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

So I've been biking to work for months. I can't remember when I started -- in the summer, for sure, but not every day. I think I started biking in every day in September or October.

But sometimes I have to work offsite. Usually in Santa Monica, so I can still bike there; I just have a longer bike ride at the end. Hey, I love biking, so this is a good thing.

Except for yesterday, when I biked to the office like usual, then got a call ten minutes after I was supposed to be at a sound edit, cursed my apologies into the phone, glared at my bike (poor Doug), and hailed a goddamned cab.

First time I've been in a car in weeks. On Earth Day. Neat.

Fuck the environment, I'm late.

actual shopping list

2008-04-19T22:41:00.000-07:00

soap
toothpaste
coffee
sugar
beer
cheese
bread
cape (superhero)

i do not understand

2008-04-18T11:58:00.000-07:00

Last month, a Santa Clara County Deputy Sheriff struck three cyclists while driving on the wrong side of the road in Cupertino. Two of the cyclists were killed, and a third was severely injured.

Last week, after a month-long investigation by the California Highway Patrol (to avoid the Sheriff's Department from investigating their own colleagues), a sentence recommendation was handed down. Two years. Maximum.

The following is my complaint to the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department, submitted to their Internal Affairs Unit complaint form via web. In the box where it asked for what type of complaint, I wrote "Improper conduct."

. . . . . . . . . . .

Hello. My name is Katie O'Shea, and I'm a cyclist. I am from the San Francisco Bay Area, currently living in Los Angeles. I visit several times a year with my bicycle. My brother cycles in San Jose and Santa Clara. And I do not understand you.

I do understand that Deputy James Council killed two cyclists and injured a third while on duty on March 9th, 2008. I also understand that investigators on the case do not believe there was any instance of drunken driving involved. I am not interested in what they believe; I am interested in what they know.

The CHP, called in to handle the case because it was a deputy sheriff in the incident, did not administer a blood alcohol test. Why not? A blood sample was taken, presumably several hours later, at the station. Which is "within the letter of the law." I would like to know whether it is within the spirit of the law. A deputy sheriff was spotted driving erratically for several miles, then crossed the double yellow line, then hit three cyclists, then wandered off in a daze commenting only about his life being over, his career being over, without attempting to help the three cyclists he'd just struck. That should have aroused suspicion. That should have merited a blood alcohol test. It did not. I do not understand.

How many instances of drunk driving did Deputy Council have in the past? Two. Did this inform the CHP's decision to take a blood test at the station and not a breathalyzer? With two previous drunken driving incidents, I would think it would be in the CHP's best interests to keep Deputy Council off the road. For everyone's safety, including Deputy Council's, but mostly the general populace. Sympathy for a colleague, I understand. But sympathy at the expense of public safety, I do not understand.

It's been suggested that Deputy Council may have been sleep deprived. How long had Deputy Council been on shift before the crash? Are the hours you get from your deputies worth two lives and a big hospital bill? Are they worth it to the Gough family? What about the Peterson's? You must weigh what is more important -- a few more hours per shift per deputy, or people. If you determine that the former is more important, then I really don't understand.

It has been reported that Deputy Council will serve a maximum of two years in prison for the senseless, reckless killing of two cyclists and the brutal injuries of a third. Two years. Two people. One year per person. That seems light-handed. If the reason for the light sentence is because he was sleep-deprived, then the Sheriff's Department should take a long, hard look at their policies on work hours. How many more people will die before they change their policy? If, instead, the reason for the light sentence is because Deputy Council was "one of their own," then the CHP should take a long, hard look at what this action means. It means that they are more interested in protecting their employees than in protecting the public. If this is the protection and the service that we can expect from you in the future, I decline it. Because I do not understand it.

Katie O'Shea

. . . . . . . . . . .

You can, too.

i fucking love bikers

2008-04-12T15:18:00.000-07:00

FROM CRAIG'S LIST:

Schwinn Caliente 10-speed road bike - $80.00
Los Angeles : Garden Grove

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go through busy downtown streets, The fluttering defeats Of traffic lights at one-way two-lane roads And inefficient cars with heavy loads. A bike as lovely as a poem — smooth flow, perfect form.

20 inch frame size as measured along seat tube
29 inch standover height
27 inch tires
Shimano Tourney back derailleur

what i draw in meetings

2008-04-09T18:16:00.000-07:00

When I draw in meetings. Which is always.

I blame Eric.

art directors, take note

2008-03-27T23:18:00.000-07:00

Or draw a diagram, or whatever it is you do.

Three new image search applications that will make your life easier. Well. Two new ones, and one old one that I like.

compfight.com

picapp.com

normalroom.com

Go forth and comp, my countrymen-and-women. Make the magic happen. And I promise, I'll stop calling you "fart directors" ... just as soon as it stops being funny.

Which will be never.

tiled & terrific: changing the lexicon

2008-03-24T09:03:00.000-07:00

Once, not long ago, I tried to remove a word from my vocabulary. That word was "awesome." The word I tried to replace it with was "terrific." It means almost the same thing. (The meaning of "awesome" is "inspires awe," and that for "terrific" is "inspires terror." Awe ≠ terror ... but it's close.)

It didn't work. Mostly because "terrific" is something that junior high librarians say. That, and my own personal failure -- I kept slipping up and saying "awesome" anyway. I have no self-control, especially when it comes to words.

But this doughnut shop seems to be in alignment with my thinking. I'm wondering if they're also sick of the word "totally."

Not just terrific. Extra terrific.

A little further down is a tile store. Look closely and see that this lady is a mannequin with a swimsuit tiled directly onto her body. They can set a mood with a window, I'll tell you what, and that mood is "creeped out."

She looks lonely.

The other window has this guy. Now HE is terrific, in all senses of the word. LOOK INTO HIS EYES AND FEEL THE TERROR.

Help this robot!

And so I present to you the strip mall of discontent and loss.

i think i know why speakerphone was invented

2008-03-09T14:57:00.000-07:00

So you can talk on the phone with your mom

and also scribble on your hand

and draw a goose

and make the goose crap all over the place.

Yep. I think that's how it started.

morning observation

2008-03-05T08:52:00.000-08:00

Think about it.

notes from louise, my nonsexual partner

2008-02-21T17:49:00.000-08:00

We work together, on everything.

Even when she's not working on what I'm working on, we work together. She sits right next to me. Hi, Louise.

Oh, Louise.

And then Betsy's response, from Amsterdam. Oh, Betsy.

have you ever ...

2008-01-27T12:17:00.000-08:00

... wanted an album for a long time but not gotten around to it, because there's always new music to check out, and Horses will ALWAYS be around, and then your iTunes decides to put on a radio station, and it's your old college radio station (WBAR: ROCK ON WITH YOUR FROCK ON wbar.org), and the DJ's gotten lazy and just put on ... Horses? The whole album, beginning to end?

I have.

* * * UPDATE * * *

I think someone just didn't show up. The album's played through, like, 2 1/2 times straight. Either that, or the DJ is one lazy mothercrunker.

a couple designers that i love

2008-01-14T12:09:00.000-08:00

This first is by Elum Letterpress in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, which is near San Diego. I have big love for letterpress when it's done right, and these people did it just right. Careful, attention to detail. The number of colors on this print is insane -- to line everything up just right must have been a very time-consuming process, and it's fucking impressive.

These next ones, I forget who it's by. It's lovely and beautiful and simple for all the reasons that letterpress is not. Much looser, much less precious. But so satisfying. I love it.

zune arts: intergalactic swap meet

2007-12-12T17:34:00.000-08:00

The idea behind the story is, sharing with your friends enriches you both. "Hybrid vigor" was the phrase that kept running through our heads. Also, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Which, if you've ever listened to a bangin' setlist, you know is true.

Animation/Direction: againstallodds
Music: The Deadly Syndrome
Client: Zune Arts
Agency: 72andSunny
Art Director: Katie O'Shea
Writer: Louise Shieh

busted

2007-12-07T22:08:00.000-08:00

I bit it last night on the way home from a bar, and then again this morning on the way to work. Nothing bad at all -- three scrapes that I can count, and a bruise or nine. But Louise tells me I say "OW" every time I move . Or emote -- smiling hurts, as one of the scrapes is on my chin. "Ha ha ha ha ha OW."

The best part: It's picture day at work.

midnight ridazz made it to the cover of the los angeles times 'the guide'

2007-12-06T10:47:00.000-08:00

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-gd-cover6dec06,1,73871,full.story?ctrack=2&cset=true

In a freaky coincidence, the idea for the gang (I call it a gang; we're the friendliest, most-inclusive, least-threatening gang ever) started with two graphic designers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 2004. I was living (and designing) in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, in 2004. If I hadn't been borrowing my sister's motorbike all the time, I might have been on a bike and seen them on the road. Life is strange.

Love,
Katie

also, and also-also:

2007-11-11T16:02:00.000-08:00

I forgot to post this. New bike shop in Culver City.

Edwardian Script, bikey things, overuse of graphic hearts, and proximity to my home are all things I hold dear. So yay.

I don't ride a fixed gear, but I thought I'd check it out on behalf of some friends who are looking into it. The fixed people did not judge me for pulling up on a geared bike. Or maybe they did, and I just didn't pick up on it. What I'm saying is, they've got some decent starter stock, some tasty bikes, and they're nice. So yay, again.

portland south

2007-11-11T15:21:00.000-08:00

In honor of the overcast skies, the relentless chill, and the constant drizzle, I'm going through today as if I still lived in Portland.

I'm wearing every piece of wool I own. The socks are high and striped. The sweatshirt is hooded ("Like your eyes!" says my dirty, ill-cut hair). I just came back from a coffee shop, where I had organic coffee and a tasty grilled sandwich served by scruffy, attractive people. And I'm on my way to a paper store, where I'm going to source cardstock for some arty-crafty thing I'm super excited about. It's been another car-free weekend, after a nearly car-free week. I'm thinking later on I'll hang out on a bridge and pass out beers to bikers.

Wait, that last one ... I don't think that really works here.

zune arts: laika

2007-11-07T18:15:00.000-08:00

We took advantage of an historical event -- the 50th anniversary of Russia launching a dog into outer space -- and re-interpreted it. What would happen if Laika landed somewhere? What if it were a dog utopia? What would you do? Would you share your riches? Or enjoy your dog utopia ... alone?

Animation/Direction: Ro Rao
Music: The Aliens
Client: Zune Arts
Agency: 72andSunny
Art Director: Katie O'Shea
Writer: Charlie Stephenson

The accompanying banner campaign invited viewers to peer through a telescope to find and follow Laika. Once her planet was found, the viewer was invited to find out her full story at the Zune Arts website.

dr. james watson discovers DNA, drops ball

2007-10-18T01:59:00.000-07:00

Watson, the guy on the left, was instrumental in the discovery of the double helix structure of molecular DNA. 45 years later (now), his speeches at prominent scientific forums are getting canceled.

Something to do with a little thing or two he said, namely that he thinks black people aren't as smart as white people, and that women should have the right to abort their babies if it could be proven they would be gay.

What a jerk.

Scientific progress is a treacherous path, people. Treacherous.

bitch

2007-09-29T22:32:00.000-07:00

I don't know that I've ever been called a bitch before. I've been called plenty of other things, but not a bitch.

Or maybe it's just that I don't bike enough on Saturday nights. On the way back from some Los Feliz thing, I had a perfectly delightful ride. Really good, in fact, until about a mile from my house, at which point a Jeep driver was compelled to impart his opinion.

"Bitch!"

I was doing the bike driving thing (acting like a car in the absence of a bike lane), in the right lane. They were in the left lane. Then the light turned red. I passed them, they passed me. I gave them the "I'm looking at you because I want to not hit you, but I'm looking with cold, dead eyes." Then, this:

"GET ON THE SIDEWALK, HIPPIE."

Wow, wrong. I would have expected "hipster" before "hippie," but hipster's not right, either -- I do bathe. Most accurate would be "Nine-year-old boy!" because, well, I dress like a nine-year-old boy. Or "Fashion-Lazy!" I would have taken that. Or, like, "Rigorous with your Political Beliefs, in your Words and in your Actions!"

Oh shit, I am a hippie.

the trouble with insomnia

2007-09-21T04:25:00.001-07:00

... is that you sit there, not-sleeping, doing quick math to determine how many hours of sleep you could have if you could JUST get to sleep JUST now. But the math itself keeps the mind humming, and so you don't sleep, and the fucking math goes on and on.

But at least "An Affair to Remember" is on. Deborah Kerr's dresses, and especially the colors of her dresses, are inspired and inspiring. Charles LeMaire. Good work.

chaly angel

2007-09-13T17:27:00.000-07:00

Once, I lived in Cambodia. (Now, I don't.)

This was a comic I drew while living over there. Click on it for clarity.

bill murray explains golf cart incident

2007-09-04T23:46:00.000-07:00

Here.

While he's explaining things, maybe he can talk about his appearance at the Getty's "Icons" exhibit.

Here he is, reading the first script for "Groundhog Day."

i wish for financial solvency

2007-08-16T23:42:00.000-07:00

I'm sure -- I'm SURE -- this was my worksheet for one of those quizzes where you enter your birth month followed by your favorite number followed by the names of the person to your right, the last person you called, the last person who texted you, your roommate's sibling ... the name of your honorary younger brother ... song stuck in your head right now ... um, song stuck in your head twenty years ago .... two songs with the same title .... and the thing you wish for but will never get. And then you add it all up and it tells you the age at which you're going to die.

Unfortunately, I didn't write down my answer. So I'm still in the dark on that. Any insights from MySpace quiz experts would be greatly appreciated.

first date at a greek restaurant, anyway

2007-06-23T23:37:00.000-07:00

What? It was on.

laundry hampers, vacuum cleaner, bookshelves (2-3)

2007-06-19T23:33:00.000-07:00

If I'm going to tack that last item on the end (before the closing time), then I might as well not write a list at all. But I did.

Apparently, the only other thing my heart desired was this shirt.

It's a pretty good shirt, though. I mean, just look at it.

tape measure, notebook, tights (black)

2007-06-17T23:29:00.000-07:00

Reproduced here is a shopping list that I found in the back pocket of my jeans.

So telling. So, so telling.

i've lost more diodes that way

2007-06-15T23:24:00.000-07:00

why i can't get up in the morning

2007-06-13T23:19:00.000-07:00

DUN DUN.

the quality of an idea vs. the quantity of words needed to explain idea

2007-06-12T23:06:00.000-07:00

Blah blah parabola, blah blah blah asymptote, y = o.

oh, go on

2007-06-03T23:01:00.000-07:00

Chris says I'm kinda mean.
It's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.

nice, or smart?

2007-06-03T22:53:00.000-07:00

Stay off the line.

it's important that you know

2007-05-19T02:03:00.000-07:00

I am a pacifist. However, I will resort to violence if pushed beyond the limits of reason.

zune arts: mother like no other

2007-05-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

Mom's Day is a tough one. You want to show your mom that you love her. But you don't want to come off cloying, or worse yet, insincere. And how do you give her a gift from the heart that shows you're not just giving it because you're supposed to? Get her something she'll really like. That's what our little beaver friend was thinking when he gathered all the sticks and flowers and leaves he could find into the most beautiful bouquet he could imagine. All for his wonderful mum.

She really, really liked it. A lot.

Animation/Direction: Yves Geleyn
Music: the bird and the bee
Client: Zune Arts
Agency: 72andSunny
Art Director: Katie O'Shea/Bryan Rowles
Writer: Katie O'Shea/Bryan Rowles

lemurs, dodgeball, and cheerleading

2007-04-21T02:02:00.000-07:00

Lemurs are the smallest primates, or so I'm told on The Discovery Channel. I think I heard that right.

I know a fair amount about lemurs, owing to a grade school/high school classmate who used to paint them quite often. (Did you know that they are found almost exclusively on Madagascar? I did.) So I'm, like, reliving an element of my childhood by watching this show. (By the way, the grade school classmate is Andrew Denman, noted wildlife artist. Take a look.)

Which is weird, because earlier today I watched Dodgeball, which was directed by a kid in my sister's class in high school. Rawson Thurber. (There is much irony in him directing a movie about underdogs, by the way. Great irony, indeed.) It's old home week or something.

So there should be a third person from my childhood who has made a name for himself (or herself ... step up, ladies!), to complete what could be an Orinda Fame Trifecta. Perhaps we'll hear from Bernadette Protti or something.

nickelback = bad; nickelback + nickelback = kind of good

2007-02-11T01:59:00.000-08:00

Check out this ball of horror.

Nickelback recorded almost exactly the same song twice and called it two songs. Overlay one song over the other, however, and wouldn't you know it but they make some pretty nice harmonies.

They should do this all the time.

goddamned car ads

2007-02-06T01:57:00.000-08:00

You know those car ads where the camera is sitting on the dash or (more likely) it's mounted on the hood of the car? And the car's going very, very, very, very fast? And you can't really see the road ahead until you're already around that turn, over that hill, &c? And the road's wet.

Okay, so have you ever woken up from a deep slumber in a car to the realization that the driver has ALSO just awoken from a deep slumber? Such that the road has turned and the car has not? It kind of looks and feels like those ads.

STOP IT, AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY. JUST STOP IT. IT'S FREAKY.

Thanks.

Love,
Katie

memo slut

2007-01-29T01:54:00.000-08:00

I pass this every day on my way to work.

MEMO SLUT. Seems an odd place to voice one's concerns about another's licentious use of the "Reply All" button, but then ... well, I see it every day. On my way to work. So maybe it's reaching its intended audience after all. I feel so ... cheap.

"By the way," you're thinking, "How'd you take that picture, you letterhead whore?" Carefully, that's how. Very carefully.