To a friend, recently gone:

Lulu, small Lulu
you were a container into which we poured
the creamy batter of our affections.
It was the lumpy kind, inconsistent at times
and bubbly with a mischevious temperament,
but it was truly made of the good stuff.
(All organic. Handmade. And extremely locally grown.)
And one way or another,
you always expanded flawlessly
to accept all that we could ladle.

Sadly, it was not until the end
that we knew
the eggshell thinness
of your mortal boundaries
and saw the many
cracks on the bottom
that appeared one by one.

Yet you sat, even in the final hours, like a little round queen
wreathed in a rabbit fur so thickly luxuriant that you simply reabsorbed
every drop that escaped out.

And because of this,
though you are now, as they say,
lidded, capped, forever sealed from us,

My little friend,
you will also be
forever filled to the brim.

***

On the evening of March 25, 2010, our cat Lulu was put to rest at the terminus of a staunch and brave struggle against chronic renal failure. To the last moment, she was calm, affectionate, and so soft behind the ears that, when you petted her there, it feels like you imagined there was something at your fingertips.

Lulu was, as Jess pointed out, my first real pet, the first animal I really put my heart and soul into loving and caring for. To make matters somewhat complicated, I never quite felt that she was really my pet, more that she was on loan from Jess’ dad, who couldn’t keep her because of other bullying cats in the house (he also subsidized much of her substantial medical costs). But in the end, in the short year that we’ve had her, Yang, my housemates and I all fell in love with her…

She was a middle-aged lady, as far as cats go, and had somewhat of a mysterious aura. For instance, we never quite solved the mystery of why she liked to walk around and stare at us with her tongue slightly poking out. (Jess would say this was because she was brain-damaged.) Or why she seemed to have a fear of handbags. Or even exactly how old she was.

But one thing that was clear was her growth from a shy, almost fearful kitty into a confident and comfortable little ruler of our apartment. She went from scurrying for cover whenever footsteps were heard in the stairwell to curiously peeking at visitors and even wandering out into the hallway to explore on one occasion.

It pains me a little to think that, just when life was getting good, it had to be taken away from her. But then I have to remind myself that cats don’t have any sense of time as we do, nor do they engage in retrospection or entertaining future hopes. We did give her all we had, and would have given more if her punishing disease did not render her future prospects so bleak and pain-filled.

I still cry a little bit after her, three days later. When I’m alone I think about her even though the more rational part of my brain implores me to change the topic. Of course, when daily life moves on I move with it. But no amount of cerebral reckoning can change the fact that the small reminders in and around the house of her presence still create this little tugging feeling in the center of my chest. I wonder when it will go away. If I’m anything like my boss Carol, another cat devotee, it never will.

And that’s when you know that a pet really knew love, which is all that matters.

I’m starting to feel like technology is actually the culprit here. Rather than helping me index information for easy retrieval forever and ever into golden posterity and as a result making me a smarter, happier, more informed individual, it’s just making me darn lazy. I’ll admit it, I’ve developed Instapaper Syndrome. The variety of organizational technologies out there enable me to see something cool and think “Ah, I’ll note this down so I can check it out later.” Later never comes. Don’t even look at my Instapaper account; it’s embarrassing.

There was a time before this, believe it or not, when I’d actually spend forever on one single website, exploring every nook and cranny, reading the text like a book from cover to cover. I am now lucky if I get beyond the front page. Yes, I am guilty, guilty for promising myself that I will educate, enlighten, inspire, and expand my mind, but in fact not following through. My Delicious account… it is a gallery of broken promises, a chest of false hopes, a seething cauldron of… okay I’ll stop.

Technology proposes to solve all of our woes, but it can only do effectively so if we do not take a step back from our responsibilities and give it to the technology instead. We must meet it in the middle. We can’t “devolve” our brains and habits just because technology makes it easier. Especially if the brain is such an amazing thing. Just think ‚Äî there’s tagging, and then there’s the amazingly efficient network of neurons that recall a piece of learned knowledge to mind in an instant. The brain, for all its faults, is the best database, with the most elegant information architecture, known to man. Technology should be used as a failsafe, not a replacement.

I need to get back to that. Hence, the following resolution:

Focus on one thing on the internet a day. Study it in depth. Tag, categorize, and index it in my brain. And don’t even think about touching the Delicious bookmarklet until the above has been accomplished.

POSTSCRIPT

Thinking about this has gotten me excited for a short time about a new tool that would be totally awesome. It would essentially be an add-on “game” for Delicious, where the goal is to “learn” all your links, <a href=”http://lingt.com/”>Lingt</a> style. (If you do not know what Lingt is, it is essentially flash cards presented with a frequency/order determined by an algorithm developed by psychologists who have studied language acquisition and learning patterns. /LongSentenceWithLotsOfPrepositions.) It would have scorekeeping… and leaderboards… and friendly competition… and be fun and educational… and and… Or it would reduce the enjoyment of complex and interactive websites down to a passing glance at a screenshot. Okay, nevermind.

Another (maybe better) idea would be to create some kind of plugin for Firefox that will allow you to visit every site only once. It will block you from visiting the site ever again. This would force you to really make good use of your time on the site. Kind of like… the opposite of Instapaper. =)

- James Cameron, from The New Yorker

It’s resolution time again! This year, I’ve decided that I’ve had it with realistic resolutions. In the spirit of that crazy man quoted above, it’s time to break free of the chains of reason. Therefore, I am assigning myself 10 totally unachievable goals this New Year’s. Rather than trying to achieve them literally, I will look to them to inform my day-to-day activities, in the hope that I will become a smarter, healthier, more creative, and overall more better human person in the upcoming year.

Here goes:

• Sketch every single day for at least 1 hour
• Read a book every other week, alternating fiction and non-fiction
• Blog every other day
• Get up promptly when the alarm clock sounds and read the entire front page of nytimes.com over breakfast before going to work (this is probably the least realistic, actually.)
• Only focus on ONE interesting thing found on the Internet each day
• Cook through all the cookbooks I own
• Cut down the amount of my possessions by half
• Not yell at Yang ever
• Brush Lulu daily

And finally (hopefully this is not actually unrealistic):

• Get into the MFA in Interaction Design program at SVA

The Honk! parade was amazing as usual. We were once again Endangered Animals with Lipstick but with a tongue-in-cheek healthcare theme this year. We had wolves in lab coats (Dr. Wolfe) handing out prescriptions for “a 6-pack of beer before breakfast,” “30 spoonfuls of sugar with every meal” and other healthcare atrocities and people lining the streets loved them, especially the kids when they got the sugar/ice cream/caffeine ones. (I love happy people.) We also had polar bears and a skeletal Death Panel with bat wings and scythes and a Miss Public Option (Professor Pinto of Tufts U.) and a Miss Junior Single Option (her cute daughter). Our float was modified from last year’s missile to a gigantic syringe and we speared the stuffed pig with it. The pig had a banner that said “Health Care.” Finally we had picket signs with messages like “Bite a Senator” and “Who-Cares?” There are few things that I love more than making a scene in time to marching band beats while dressed up as a forest animal. With Yang and Nika! Who danced with me this year.

This is a picture of our float:

Clearly the coolest thing on campus that day.

(It’s funny how I’ve been graduated for over a year and yet I feel completely at home back on campus. I thought it would be awkward, but it isn’t… it feels like coming home. Now I know why alums drag their families back 50 years later to their alma mater, whining bored offspring in tow.)

So that was that, and I’ll be sad to miss it next year. So pretty much I’ll have to hop a bus up from New York and possibly miss a day of Grad School to get back in on the action.

That was Sunday… today was MIT Startup Bootcamp. It was 12 speakers and a total firehosian amount of information blasting you in the face. Highlights:

- Dan Theobald of Vecna following 2 extremely irreverent, charismatic young folk with a seemingly dull speech but which was chock full of wisdom. First speaker to allude to social relevance and responsibility

- Robin Chase (only female speaker) hoping for an antitrust lawsuit 10 years down the line because her company will have so monopolized the shared car industry (go Zipcar go!)

- (who was this?) showing a graph depicting his company’s growth over time and then disclaiming that it was actually a chart showing German dog food sales

- Other People’s Money = OPM = makes you high, and obstructs bowel movements

- Dharmesh Shah’s Powerpoint being the only one that clearly had a graphic design team work on it. It was stock photo central with punchy short lines set in Georgia.

- A moment of awkwardness when an audience member snagged the last opportunity to probe the last speaker on why he thinks there are so few women in attendance. I applaud her braveness and boo all the people who basically laughed her off the mic. True, it was a bit random but come on… if you did not notice that disparity today, you were probably blind.

- Angus Davis using live polling via http://www.polleverywhere.com to gather votes on what the audience wanted him to talk about

- Mini-party on Twitter made possible by intermission projection of http://visibletweets.com

- General consensus that bootstrapping is the way to go. They should have named this event Bootstrap Bootcamp.

There were lots more interesting things that were said, but I’ve run out of juice. I wish I had more, because Bolthouse Farms is pretty fantastic-tasting. And expensive. Oh but I’m tired. Tomorrow is another day.

All I can say after today is, I’m glad I brought an iPhone for this.

We’re now past the mid-way point of summer. Every summer passes too fast, regardless of whether you are on a break from schooling or now hauling your ass through the 9-to-5 grind. It just seems to be in the nature of summers to start off hopeful, effervescently charged—then to speed by like a blinded racehorse through a field of very tall grass—and to disappear. And every year, as July wanders into August, I get very restless because now we’re in the home stretch and plans have to be made good on, duties and ideas carried out, etc. etc.

I’m also getting rather restless of late because of this whole idea of living life. This feeling started soon after I graduated and I actually started to have enough time to do things other than study and write papers. Things like to really savor the time I spend with people I love, to wonder semi-full-time about the future, to engage in activities of an indulgent and somewhat domestic nature (cook, decorate, recreationally care about what I wear gasp!), etc. Now I am well-supported with a steady job, well-loved by a steadfast significant other, and well-ensconced in a beautiful apartment in one of the trendier neighborhoods of the Metro Boston Area. I find myself thinking day after day, against all my more ambitious yearnings, Wow, I could get used to this. Screw grad school screw changing the world screw opening minds and eyes with art and design. Just passing the days in a muted golden way. I know. It makes me sound downright elderly. I’m 23. But hey, in these summer days I see the shape of lifelong “happiness,” that elusive unicorn, taking shape. It is fucking gorgeous.

With every happiness, though, comes a fear. For me, this might just be the case because I grew up convinced of the idea that happiness is, by nature, a tenuous fleeting sensation, not an enduring condition. Not that I was a particularly dark kid growing up—it just was that I was often put in situations not under my control where this idea of “happiness” or “emotional fulfillment” didn’t seem to be a priority or worth discussing. So now I’ve been trained, hard-wired, to expect some sort of finality to every feeling that is good. I’ve also been hard-wired, in a way that annoys myself and others, to feel a smudge of guilt when I should be just enjoying myself.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like if I suddenly lost what I cared about the most. What would happen to this happiness of mine? I wonder if my happiness is tied down in such a fatal way, like a bee to its stinger? It’s infectiously easy to just say right now, Yes of course, if you lost what you cared about the most, life will never be the same again. And if “never the same” means “different” and right now life is at a fabulous high, then it seems likely that there’s no other way to be “different” than to go down, yeah? I’m in the middle of it all, how could I feel differently?

And so it goes, my uninspiring line of reasoning, until this week happened. Something gave me pause and eventually an alternate way of thinking. I had an older adult voice to me some lifechanging fears.

The older adult is someone from my professional life that I’ve come to really admire and respect for her wisdom and character, and, as I would soon find out, strength. One day, in reply to my inquiry on how her family was doing, she described to me the incredibly painful trials she was going through with her aging, mentally deteriorating, and emotionally delicate father. She later revealed this week a family history of Alzheimer’s, that her mother had died of Alzheimer’s and she felt she was next in line. She shared in me her desire to prepare herself for that eventuality, to even have some sort of escape plan to prevent her family from suffering the way she suffered through her mother’s ailment. I was trying hard not to cry for her, who has suffered through so much more than me and is still so brave. Later that day, before leaving, I felt like she needed a hug. She squeezed me in her arms and said “Thank you so much. You are a love. You are really a love.” It was the best hug I’d given in a long time.

I realized something, listening to her talk through her quiet pain, sharing that human connection of sympathy, and then hearing her heartfelt thanks for just a small hug. The kind of happiness you get out of providing comfort to others can be much more sustaining than the kind of happiness you get out of pleasing yourself. Out of living the good life, and having what you want, and getting what you need. The former is steady and calm and nourishing. The latter is exciting and fun and gratifying. Ultimately, I think you need a little bit of both, but a life missing the high notes of the latter is certainly not a life unworthy of living.

And this is why people have book clubs, join church organizations, volunteer, give fat sums of money to causes, spend time at neighborhood barbeques, have gigantic networks of acquaintances and friends. The human connection, that sense of beautiful altruism, is a real soul-filler, life-filler. I can imagine people living on that alone. Even if life had not given them a perfect passion, or if life had given it briefly but then took it away, it can be a life of total happiness.

Now I am a little less afraid of losing the things I care about most in life. Before, I would wonder, should the terrible happen, I wouldn’t be able to continue without a replacement. But that’s a dead-end because ultimately you know whatever replacement isn’t ever going to be the same. Now, I know this replacement business is crap, because sources of happiness outside of one’s immediate environs abound.

If you had a wonderful bike that you had since you were 16 and you loved it and it got stolen, don’t just get another bike. Get a racehorse!

Good night.