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January 2004 ArchiveWednesday, January 28, 2004Birthday IntroversionA few years ago I started a new birthday tradition. I plan nothing for my birthday. I will do no work. I spent the day with myself. I wake up and think, "What do I want to do today?" I go. I do whatever I want that day. This morning, I woke up to my friend Anne F. calling me to wish me a happy birthday! So lovely. After the phone call, I noticed something slipped under my door. A card from Kent! Kent's my ex who lives in the building. What a nice surprise. I logged on and had 6 messages from folks wishing me a happy birthday. I felt very properly ushered into my 30th year. For breakfast, I ate some bread pudding I made late the night before. Yum. I put on all of my favorite clothes. I like how much of it are happy hand-me-downs.  I futzed around emailing and sang really loud to Johnnie Ray. I bought an Amtrak ticket to go down to Champaign-Urbana next weekend to meet Dan and Gwen's brand new baby. I headed outside. I whistled "The Best is Yet to Come on the platform. Up to Evanston for one of my all-time favorite meals - the Vietnamese Rice Noodle Salad at Lulu's. Rice noodles with a great vinegary dressing, with great teriyaki beef and loads of bean sprouts, lettuce and carrot. Mmmmm.   The wet, red floor at Lulus Then to my favorite theater to see The Cooler, which I enjoyed very much. I like that none of the characters can truly wear the good/white hat or a bad/black hat. Complex situations, awkward love. And I want to know - are William H. Macy's eyes really that green? I adore Vegas, so The Cooler was a nice little injection of a favorite place on my birthday. Alec Baldwin plays a casino owner who wants to hold on the last of old, downtown Vegas - not the Disney-fied Strip. I never knew Vegas before the big, shiny, new casino showed up on the strip, but I still get it. I think next time I'll have to stay on Freemont Street. Ellen Greene as Doris perfectly captured that kind of woman. After the movie, I headed to Borders to find "You are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination" by Katherine Harmon. I had seen it in the newest Readymade. After asking to information desk men for help, I got my hands on the book. I love maps. I've seen some cool maps before like a New Yorker's view of the US, where Manhattan is gigantic and the rest of the country is all squished. But, man! This is a great collection of maps. Very much maps of the imagination. If you dig maps, you gotta get this book. I bought one for me and one for my friend John, a fellow map lover and maker. Then I headed back to my 'hood. Waiting in the ca-ca-cold on the platform. I took a picture of sign that said it was my birthday. Yeah, so it just said "January 28, 2004" but it was cool to me.  Back in my 'hood, I checked my mail. Happily, there was a client check waiting for me. This allowed me to bop on over to a fantastic antique store. I had been there the week before and had my eye on a little item. A 1950's (?) map dishtowel of "Danmark." Not terribly informational, since the land and seas are filled with cows and churches and ship - no text. But I love the bright, sweet colors and the fact that I can use it as a prop to point out where Agerbaek is on it. Next, the grocery store where I got my food for the evening. Sushi and Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream for dessert. I went home ate the sushi. Then I got sucked into a vortex of looking at fabric online. Ate ice cream. More fabric looking. Sort of an anticlimatic end with the swatch induced trance. But I peeled myself away to write this. Not a bad day. Happy birthday to me! posted on 1/28/2004 11:54:38 PM Happy
Birthday to Me and...
Tuesday, January 27, 2004NumerphobiaMy brain is not good with numbers. Ages, birthdays, phone numbers just don't stick. For anyone who knows the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, I am a INFJ, and I scored zero for S. Very telling. BUT I have officially memorized my library card number. This is a big deal in my lil' world. That means I have memorized that, my bank account number (which I've had for 8 years), a few PIN numbers, my best friend's phone number, my ex's phone number (I used to live there), a favorite client's phone number, my own damn phone number and the birthdays of my mom and sis. Oh, and yes, my birthday, which is tomorrow. posted on 1/27/2004 12:43:45 PM
Tuesday, January 20, 2004Baby, Oh Baby!My beloved friends Dan and Gwen had their baby! His name is Maxwell David Costa Jacobsohn! Woohoo! Here's a pic on the hospital's site. Well, that lights a fire under my ass to work on the baby blanket! hee hee hee... posted on 1/20/2004 09:02:22 AM The
Good News One
Cheek
Saturday, January 10, 2004Resolution Recap2003: 1. Watch Less TeeVee by getting rid of my costly cable package, buy a DVD player and get Netflix. This was very successful. My megacable package included losts of movie channels to satiate my being a movie junkie. But at $65 a month, I felt compelled to have the television on constantly. It was much more noise and distraction than entertainment. I bought a $90 DVD player, and signed up for Netflix's $19.99 package of 3 DVDs at a time. Late summer I upped my dosage to $29.99 for 5 at a time. Still half the cost of cable and I actually sit down to watch movies and there is way less teevee noise around. And I adore Netflix - but I'll save that gushing for another time. There's only three shows I miss: Six Feet Under, Coupling (which happily my PBS station is showing) and Trading Spaces. Now I pretty much never turn on the tv before 5pm, usually not until 7 pm. Next step - Turn off NPR when I'm not really listening to it. 2. Online Store Launched This was the monkey on my back for several years, but now it's LAUNCHED! Last May I got the shop up and running. If I concentrate on the lack of sales, I'll curl up into a ball. But you can't have any sales if there's no store there, so the infrastructure is there. Next step - Update the site after a fall of neglect working craft shows offline. 3. More Site Lovin'. Big success. Lots of stuff built. Even more in the works. The big thing is that I'm in the habit of working on the site and I feel like 2003 was the year that the site truly became the center of my work. Next step - Get the VisCom section going. 2004: Basically, all of my resolutions this year are wrapped up in a year long project called 1:450:365. I want to spend this year becoming more conscious of my consumption in the largest sense: 1a. Eat Better. 2003 was the year of wishing I could just take a pill instead of eating properly. My body definitely paid for it. 1b. Eat Some Debt Pie. Since I hate numbers and budgets, I'm reducing my debt by being extremely frugal and pay off everything I can to debt. And the debt is a pie chart I'm hoping to eat a big, fat slice out of this year. And this year, I'm looking at my debt as the credt card debt first. I'm very American in that regard. 1c. Simplify the Brandysphere. I often look at my 450 square foot apartment as a biosphere. I've got loads and loads of resources here and I'm pleased as punch to use things I have on hand. But then I make loads of exceptions. So, this year I'm going to do some serious using and purging of stuff here. I tell myself, "I could spend a whole year making stuff out of what I already have." Well, now, I'm challenging myself to do that. And there's lots of stuff wrapped around those three things - like voluntary simplicity, conscientious consumerism, etc. But basically, it all comes down to 1 body in 450 square feet for 365 days. Yeah, yeah, its 366 days this year, but you don't look at 366 and think "year." There's a new section for the project and, of course, a blog. It's not much yet, but it'll grow over the course of the year. When it comes to client work, the resolution is to do more graphic faciltation and information design work. Thus the Visual Communication section forthcoming. posted on 1/10/2004 11:27:18 AM
Wednesday, January 07, 2004Vegas
Adventure
Awaits
My
friend and colleague Rob sent this along and I dig it:
Tuesday, January 06, 2004Innergy posted on 1/6/2004 06:41:00 PM
Brrrr...
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