Category: On…

August 20th, 2012

The impossibility of defining taste

Of the things I tend to think about too much, the concept of personal taste has lingered on my mind for longer than it should have. By “personal taste,” I mean specifically how the differences in perception that we all depend on for unique thought and recollection cause us also to experience our own likes and dislikes – music, food, movies, people – in a way that’s vastly different from those around us.

I’ve recently taken a gig as a beer columnist for our local newspaper, and these internal arguments about personal taste have ramped up accordingly. I’ve found there’s nothing more difficult than writing about literal taste – about what makes a beer good, and what floral notes are found within, and why someone should drink and enjoy a certain kind of beer – because my own tastes seem to vary wildly from what’s typically found on a beer rating site like BeerAdvocate.

In this way, I’ve been forced to write in a way that sidesteps critical taste altogether. I’m wary of the BeerAdvocate model, which dictates ratings based on specific criteria. I’m wary of any rating system that doesn’t take into account experience, context and, above all, personal taste.

Though many of us are tempted to confirm our taste by finding out what others think, our taste isn’t necessarily built through consensus. The things we like are determined by the experiences we encounter. The beer I like, the music I like, the people I like, the books I like – all of these are influenced by context, even more than they’re influenced by content.

Personal taste crates outliers. We all have a Hall and Oates hidden away somewhere – something so out of tune with the rest of our collected taste that there’s no explanation but that it has made the rare combination of emotion, history and pure unbridled enjoyment.

I listen to things differently than you do. You taste things differently than I do. My palate is dull and unrefined. Your ear for music might be tempered toward jazz, while mine gravitates toward guitars. Taste is always relative, and judging otherwise is foolish.

It’s also the hardest thing we can overcome. Our taste is the most visible part of our personality – from the clothes we wear to the music we listen to.

Criticizing personal taste, trying to put words to something that’s often wordless, comparing dissimilar concepts in a vain attempt at exposition. We struggle to explain why we like the things we like, and why those things are justifiable. And the worst part is: there’s no way around it.

We like what we like. We’re evolutionally determined to discredit the things we don’t. Personal taste is what we fight against, and it’s what makes us individuals.

Category: On..., Writing

Comments: 2

April 10th, 2012

Scared

I popped up from the ground and ran. I was bleeding. A lot. My face was a mess, mashed into god knows what. But I couldn’t think about that. I was only half a block from my house, so I ran. I just ran.

Behind me lay my bike, left behind in an awkward angle, its front wheel released from the frame and its front fork jammed into the grass. The reflector lay strewn across the parking lot. My friend, who shifted from laughing to not laughing to genuine concern, ran behind me, trying to catch up.

I would later recount the scene to my father, my mother, an admitting nurse and a reconstructive surgeon: I was a half block from my house when my wheel had come off my bike. I was riding down a hill. The fork of my bike came down first, and I went up and over. My face went into the concrete. Where I slid. Where I spent just fractions of a second, jarred, confused. Then: alive.

I was alive. But I wasn’t hurting. I wasn’t in pain.

I was scared shitless.

Not Knowing Enough To Know What You Don’t Know

The web moves quickly, and we struggle to run along with it. I was reminded of this at the recent IA Summit in New Orleans, where I found myself hanging out with a group of the weekend’s speakers. As we laughed and ate and drank and talked about anything but information architecture, I realized that these people knew each other from way back. I was lagging in both familiarity and experience.

And, as the weekend rolled on, I realized just how much I was lagging in knowledge. The people I had spend the weekend getting to know were all accomplished speakers who could engage in hour-long discussions on IA, while all I could do is sit back and soak it in. I walked into the conference expecting to learn more about information architecture. I never expected to leave learning just how much I didn’t know about the field.

Turns out, this isn’t rare. This shit happens all the time.

Here’s some dude walking into a meeting with his first big client. Here’s a new author who’s signed an agreement for her first book. Here’s a small-time strategist who’s been asked to speak intelligently with much smarter people about things that may or may not be over his head.

These situations are common. They are called “New Situations”,” as in “This is something you’ve never done before.” They are situations in which we are required to be on point, knowledgable and charming, lying through our teeth about our experience. At all times, we’re scared to be found out, which means we’re scared of being discovered as an amateur.

As if we didn’t all start as amateurs. As if we weren’t all scared when we started something new. The difference is whether we took that fear and used it to our advantage.

My Little Black Book

I collect fears like some collect phone numbers, storing them away for future correspondance. Each one is categorized by relationship, given its own avatar and recalled as the mood fits.

Here’s a section I like to call “Professional Disembowelment.” It’s filled with doubts. I met them all when I started writing, and they still threaten to tear me apart. There’s the Fear of Being Found Out. There’s the Fear of Hackitude. There’s the Fear of Speaking and Not Knowing What I’m Talking About. The gang’s all here, folks, and they’re ready to party.

Sometimes, I steal fears: “Will My Child Be Okay?” and “Am I As Big Of An Asshole As I Sometimes Seem?” are things I’ve seen manifest in close friends. “Will I Be Overweight Forever” was borrowed from the Mass Media Television Complex. “Am I A Good Husband/Father/Friend” was lifted from everyone, everywhere, ever.

We all have these little black books, where fears and anxieties collect and pool and begin choking on our ability to work and create and live. They stop circulation. As the pools become muddy and still, they continue to coalesce until we do something about them.

We can ignore them and watch as they silently take over. We can accept them and stay stagnant. We can confront them and learn from them.

I never delete a fear. I never know when I’ll need it again.

Here’s a Moral, I Guess

Without fear, I am nothing.

Without the fear of being left behind, not accepted by my peers, forced to live in the nerd I’ve imagined myself to be, I’d have never met any of my best friends. What’s more, I’d have never met Kerrie. I’d have never captured her heart. I’d have never learned to feed off of her strength.

Without being thrown into a new industry, forced to write by the seat of my patched-together pants, scared to death that a client was going to come back and ask why they had hired such a damned hack, I’d have never pushed myself to become better.

Without the fear that I’d be left out of something wonderful, I’d have never moved toward the web.

Without the fear that I’d be discovered as a fraud – scared shitless that I’d open a drawer and find a litter’s worth of rabbit feet, proving that everything from the past five years was an extended exercise in luck management – I wouldn’t keep fighting to learn more.

Where there’s fear, there’s consciousness. We don’t fear things we don’t care about. I am who I am because I’ve stopped fighting the uncomfortable. I’ve accepted fear as a necessary part of progress, separating it from anxiety, using it for good instead of for ulcers. I haven’t done anything special – nothing that we all can’t do. I just bucked up and accepted life. Accepted fear. Accepted progress.

Without the fear, I stand still. We all do. Fear is the next killer productivity app.

We Move On

It only took a few minutes to get to the emergency room. My mother arrived shortly after. I was bandaged, gauzed and cosmetically altered, my chin sewn together and swaddled in gauze.

I usually forget about the accident, but I’m often reminded of the scars. I can still feel the lump where my tooth punctured my lip. I can still see the white line on my chin that refuses to beard over.

I can still feel the impact. Every time I get on a bike. Every time I ride down a hill. Every time I wobble, my tire sticking in a curb or against a railroad track.

What’s more, I feel it every time Sierra gets on a bike in the backyard and starts riding in circles. I feel it every time Isaac, unaware of his own mortality, speeds down the sidewalk head first, feet dragging, full speed. It was my accident – my blood, and my shock – but I’ve saddled them with the repercussions. I hover over them, I coddle them, and I sometimes block the warm rays of carefree childhood.

When I was a kid, I was scared of people. I’ve never gotten over that; struggling against the undertow of introversion has become one of my pastimes. I hope that my kids will learn from my mistakes – that being scared is okay, that you SHOULD be scared, that you can’t progress without the fear of failure and the fear of mistakes and the fear of being discovered.

But they probably won’t. They can’t. They have to make their own mistakes. They will develop their own fears.

They will learn from them. They will become stronger. On their own. In time. With or without my help. Which means all I can do is hug them and comfort them and hope they learn their lesson long before I did.

Category: Career, On..., Vilhauer, Web, Writing

Comments: 3

February 7th, 2012

You can’t save them all

There’s the new deli place, and there’s the place that’s delicious but no one remembers to go there, and there’s that Indian restaurant that you’re still scared won’t make it, and there’s a few places you’ve never even seen. Those new places sell pot pies and german baked goods, both of which sound delicious. There’s the pizza place with the floppy pizza and horrible service.

How can so many restaurants exist in such a small space? You want them all to succeed. It’s an impossible paradox – you go the places you love, but by doing so you never give the new places a chance; or, you go to the new places and neglect your old stand-bys.

If you’re lucky, the choices are made for you. The pot pies aren’t as great as advertised. The owner of the pizza place beat his wife. The Indian restaurant is too far away.

You do two things. You eat out every day. Or you promote the hell out of the restaurants you love and hope others will eat out every day.

You can like lots of things, but you can’t like them all at the same time. You have to let something go. You can’t save them all.

Category: Food, On...

Comments: 1

January 13th, 2012

It’s more complicated than that

My daughter is four years old. The other day, as I was leaving the house, she asked me why I needed to go to work. “Why can’t you stay home?” she said.

My simple answer was, “Dear, you see, I need to go to work so I can make money, so we can have nice things and eat nice meals.” She accepted that answer as truth.

What I didn’t say was that I enjoy going to work. That there are days when going to work is a break from the kids, as much as I love them, and that while I would certainly rather spend the day with her and her brother, there are times when I need to get out and think at an adult level.

I didn’t mention that I don’t work for the money, but for the challenge – for the drive, for the thrill of making things, for the rush that comes with collaborating with other people.

I just said I was going to make money. It was the easy answer. Because I didn’t have the time – nor did she have the attention – for me to tell her truth: that it’s much much more complicated than that.

Deforestation

If there’s one thing that fuels today’s grab for pageviews, it’s opinions. Hard ones. This or that. Nothing in between. Nothing that veers into the hazy grey field of compromise.

“Summarize that,” they say. “Give me the bullet point version,” they demand. Time is of essence. Boil it down so it no longer needs thought.

So when we talk about whether the New York Times should be more vigilant in their fact checking, or whether yoga will cause you irreparable harm, we’re predisposed to boil it down to the most simple argument. I know I do this. We all do, in some ways.

Maybe it’s not our fault. Maybe we’ve been taught to believe that the ability to create concise descriptions of complicated things is a sign of success when. Really, it’s the opposite. You’ve succeeded when you can explain a complex subject without losing the nuance. I know: that’s hard to do. So we summarize. So we cut corners. We ignore the complexity.

It’s not a matter of missing the forest for the trees – it’s that we’re cutting down all of the trees and wondering where the forest went.

On Argument

A year and a half ago, during the 2010 South Dakota Festival of Books, I watched Michael Hart – the late founder of Project Gutenberg – and Michael Dirda – Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic – present a panel on “Reading in the Digital Age.”

As one might expect, Hart spoke at length about how the printed book was dead, that all writing should be done digitally for the benefit of mass consumption and for those who may not be able to afford a printed tome. Dirda, on the other hand, spoke about the necessity of aesthetics, of the tactile nature of holding a book in your hand, of the feeling of being that you cannot recreate in an e-reader.

Both made some good points. But the title of the panel is misleading. This presentation was no more about reading in the digital age than it was about koala mating habits. Where we expected some sort of solid discourse on where print vs. digital may eventually compromise, we instead received a kind of ribald sniping. It was a battle between two opposing viewpoints, both refusing to admit middle ground, incapable of giving an inch.

While the answer lie somewhere in the middle of the pitch, these two men fought over which side of the field to enter.

Respecting Complexity

If a single idea has followed me around this year, from politics to art and work to friendships, it’s been this one: “it’s more complicated than that.”

It’s centrally important to seek simplicity, and especially to avoid making things hard to use or understand. But if we want to make things that are usefully simple without being truncated or simplistic, we have to recognize and respect complexity — both in the design problems we address, and in the way we do our work.

Erin Kissane, “What I Learned About the Web in 2011″ via A List Apart

My experience at the South Dakota Festival of Books is no different than any experience one might find watching cable television, or at a political debate, or when discussing which Led Zeppelin album is the best. We’ve been trained to take a side and dig in for battle.

When we go to battle intellectually, we find comfort in absolutes. They afford us a bit of security. There are no holes to be poked in our theories.

Part of the challenge of art and science and rhetoric is in finding the nuances; there is no topic worth discussing that doesn’t hold some grey area, and there is no grey area that is worth ignoring. But grey areas? They’re hard. So we ignore them. And that’s how misinterpretation seeps into our lives.

Naming Things

Take, for example, the industry in which I work: web design, development and strategy. For the past several years, people have tried to put together a simple, concise description of content strategy – what is it, and how do we quickly explain it to our bosses? We understand that there’s a need for that description in a business sense, but our answer is often lacking in nuance. We trade length for clarity; we discard the messy details to gain a certain level of buzzworthiness.

Truth is, content strategy means different things to different people. What’s more, THAT’S OKAY. Just as “web development” means different things to different people, we still have freedom to interpret our work in a way that makes sense to us.

So we stick with “content strategy” – an awkward word that barely captures the extent of what we do. But we’re not alone in this: language is hard, and though we struggle to assign simple words to complex arrangements, and though they may seem trite and inaccurate, oftentimes it’s the best we can do.

Communication isn’t perfect. Again: THAT’S OKAY.

This is not an industry-specific thing, either. Ask someone to explain the scientific method. Depending on their field of expertise, you may hear several variations of the base process. Ask someone to explain something with a clear purpose and structured set of rules – baseball, for instance. Ask a baseball fan. Ask a baseball historian. Ask someone with no connection to the game. To some, it’s a game. To others, it’s a past-time. To the haters, it’s a distraction.

Black. White.

Words allow us to communicate. But they also fail us, in that we’re driven to compress theories that should, in fact, become more robust. We’re taught to say more with less, to edit and edit until there’s nothing left to chance, to push things into a smaller box. So we cut the non-crucial elements. And we lose the nuance. And we wonder why this seemingly complicated theory has been boiled down to a Cliff’s Notes version – all solution, no reasoning.

Sure, most things should be said in fewer words. But there are a lot of things that should be said in more.

We’re challenged to understand the future in as complete a way as possible. To shy away from absolutes, and to embrace the grey area, charging in full speed and making sense of the fray. There are discoveries there. There is truth. There is completeness.

We can’t take one side or the other – not in good faith – without understanding that, regardless of the subject, it’s often more complicated than that.

War is good. War is bad. It’s more complicated than that.

We should be liberal. We should be conservative. It’s more complicated than that.

We should fight to stay neutral, and we should always look at all angles of a subject, and we should stop trying to sum up incredibly complex processes and concepts and feelings into simple, single-serving soundbites. We should run to the middle and be implicit in our embrace.

Except, let’s be honest.

It’s more complicated than that.

Category: Content Strategy, Journalism, On..., Politics, Technology, Words

Comments: 2

January 10th, 2012

The things we make

I believe that, as humans, we are unique from most species in that we are driven to make things for aesthetic alone. We don’t just make things because we need them, but because they make us feel good. Because they are interesting.

We don’t write blog posts, or make interesting websites, or paint or build works of art because they will help us survive, but because we’re driven to find the beauty in life. Even in the case of life’s staples, we embellish the simple act with art.

For example, we don’t learn and perfect artisan bread-making because we feel the need to nourish ourselves, but because we are fascinated by the art and culture of bread, and because we want something more than just another loaf of Wonder bread. Otherwise, we’d just throw bread, flour and water together and eat eat eat.

We make things because it’s fun. Because it’s there. Because we’re human.

The rub, then, becomes not “should we make something?” but “what should we make?” It’s here that we begin separating from each other, where our tastes diverge and our identities are built. Some find a passion and focus. Others are content with consuming, feeding off of the things others make. And some (those poor few) never land on anything. They bounce from one thing to another. They are the anti-polymath: the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none character in life’s production cycle.

There’s something to be said about letting things go and understanding that we can’t do all of the things. I’ve never been able to do that. Maybe you’ve never been able to do it either. What it means is that, while others are making and perfecting their passion, we’re busy dipping our hand into every bucket.

Maybe that’s okay. But it all seems a little manic, to me.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying, “Hey, look. In addition to the photos and the blogs and the industry-speak and the record collection and the new running habit and the beer making and the family (the family, by the way, are the only thing I feel I’m doing at full strength anymore, which is glorious in its own right) I decided to give you this.”

“It’s a podcast.”

“It’s something I made. Me and two of my friends.”

“It’s probably crude and definitely low-production and certainly more of an inside joke that it means to be, but it’s a start.”

“It might be funny. We don’t know. But we made it.”

That’s all that matters, sometimes. We made this thing. For us. And for you. (But mostly for us.)

Category: On..., Podcast

Comments: 3

December 29th, 2011

I lie to my kids, every Christmastime, because I’m supposed to

Santa isn’t real, but don’t tell my kids. They still believe in him, like the little fools they are.

That sounds harsh, and it is. But that’s how it feels when, willingly, I continue to convince my kids that the presents they got for Christmas came from some dude that broke into their house, some guy that was initially set up as a representation of sainthood – Saint Nicholas! – and has morphed into a ninja-like spectre of gift-giving.

Saint Nicholas of Myra gave gifts to the poor, devoted his life to his religion, and became the patron saint of children, sailors and the local pawn shop. St. Nicholas of the Netherlands is a character of folklore. In Germany, St. Nicholas is an approximation of Odin, a god in human clothing not unlike Jesus himself. These stories have been twisted, adapted and changed from their original celebration of giving, to the point that Santa has become a THING; no longer a representation of charity, Santa is now How We Get Presents.

We all know that. But my kids don’t. My kids don’t understand that Santa represents an abstract thought, just as they don’t understand that Dora the Explorer represents growth through following directions and learning language. There’s one difference, though: my kids don’t think Dora the Explorer is a real person.

So we lie to our kids for tradition’s sake. There’s nothing that we’ve given to our children that we haven’t want to claim ourselves, but there’s this unspoken rule that, yes, THIS gift is from Santa. Yes, that Santa. Yeah. The fat guy who ate the cookies.

It’s so ingrained that we don’t feel icky about it. But this year, I did. I felt downright AWFUL about pretending there was a Santa, that I took advantage of our four-year-old’s trust and our two-year-old’s naivety by keeping the charade up. I hated it. But I did it. And I’m questioning whether I do it again.

If you were raised in a typical Christian-based house as a kid, you remember the time you found out Santa wasn’t real. You remember it because it was one of the first times you realized your parents lie. That they’d lied to your face, for years, about the person who brought the gifts. You either accepted it for what it was, or you were sad and Christmas was ruined for the year, but one thing always remained: you wondered what else your parents lied about.

What else is simply a facade? What else should I question, refuse to trust, and all of that Rage Against the Machine worry.

Dramatic, yes. But Kerrie and I have made a point not to lie about things to our children. Outside of occasional lies of omission, we’ve done a decent job – as decent job as one can with two inquisitive whippersnappers wandering around.

But SANTA. Oh. Santa, Santa, Santa.

Next year? I hope Santa has gone away.

Category: Isaac, On..., Sierra

Comments: 1

October 18th, 2011

Sierra and the caterpillar

On Saturday, we found a caterpillar. A yellow caterpillar, crawling up the side of the south-side Target, impossible to miss, reckless to ignore.

“Sierra! Isaac! Come check this out!”

Sierra fell in love, and we brought it home. We put it in a plastic bug carrier that she had received for one of her birthdays. We gave it two leaves and a bit of grass. And we watched as it tried to crawl the sides.

It never ate those leaves, and it never touched the grass. Last night, it died.

You and I know that this caterpillar could have died from any number of things. The cold, the new location, some sickness or old age or whatever. Nothing to do with us; in fact, nothing to do with anything other than the random cycle of life.

If everything had gone according to plans, this caterpillar would have turned into a moth. Instead, it died.

Sierra asked about it, and we were blunt. We tried to explain that it was probably sick before we got it, and that there would be more caterpillars in the future, and that we should be happy that we gave it a good home until the day it died, as if we were some kind of moth hospice and the kitchen counter was some kind of converted hospital bed.

Tears. All of them, at that moment. Tears until there couldn’t be any tears left.

Explaining death isn’t that easy. It shouldn’t be. It should be something that’s felt, not explained away as a cold scientific fact. This encounter with death was Sierra’s first conscious brush with the concept; there will be many more, and it will never get easier. Never.

That’s okay.

So Kerrie took Sierra out to the garden. One trowel, one clump of dirt, a hundred or so tears. And there Alicia the Caterpillar lies, in our garden, next to a dying tomato plant, surrounded by worms and soil and compost. Sierra is convinced those worms will take care of her favorite caterpillar in the entire world, and we’re not dissuading her.

She came back inside, read a few books, and began to let it go.

She hasn’t gotten over it yet, though.

That’s okay, too.

Category: On..., Sierra

Comments: 2

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