[Click on the grid to see a larger version, or click on these links to see larger versions of individual photos: 1. snowy (8/365), 2. snow day, again (32/365), 3. starling (62/365), 4. gray day (90/365), 5. prowling (150/365), 6. indigo and orange, 7. evening, maverick square (195/365), 8. stacked (223/365), 9. electric, 10. fall, high line (273/365), 11. windows, 12. eastie lights ]

Though at times I was not sure I would, I did complete a 365 project this year. I’m glad I did; many of these pictures are from that project.

I used my trusty Canon 40D, my android camera phone, and my new crush the Fujifilm X100 to take these pictures. Most of them were taken in my neighborhood and a few were taken on really good vacation trips. (Repeat locations from last year: Rockport and NYC.) Conspicuously absent are photos taken looking out a plane window: I spent way, way too much time traveling earlier in 2011 and those mostly aren’t the parts that made me happiest.

I’m not sure what photo projects I’ll find myself working on this year, but I believe there will be projects. I love spending time looking and photographing, and I’m too much of a geek not to turn that into a project or two.

Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination has such a compelling idea as its central premise that I kept thinking about it, long after I finished reading the book. What would happen if our injuries, our illness, our pain started to glow? How would the world be different (would it?) with that sort of shining?

Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest is about obsession, discovery, longing, dreams, and sex. Valente’s imagination is extraordinary: a lesser writer would never get to you to believe in what she can see.

Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang is one of the funniest stories about one of the most fucked up families you’ll ever read. Funny as in haha, as in something off, as in weird: the Fangs are all kinds of funny. The Fangs are performance artists who raised two children (as props? as performance?), so what does it mean, now that they are grown?

Wolf Erlbruch’s Duck, Death and the Tulip is an unusual children’s book. It’s about death (not a common topic for picture books) and it isn’t preachy, sugarcoated, or evasive. The quiet illustrations are beautiful, evoking the right balance of sadness and acceptance. This books serves as a reminder that picture books are an art form.

But speaking of art, we are really talking about a cultural shift, and it is art that is so important when you want to change a culture. We doctors can talk pathology and disease forever, but what really causes change is when art — the narrative, the music, and the things that add value and joy to our lives — is directed in a way that is congruent with what’s healthier for us. That’s where we need to be going.

I first read and bookmarked Our Ailing Communities five years ago. Going through some older digital files I rediscovered it. As the spirit seems aligned with the ongoing #Occupy protests, I thought I’d share it.

I am not taking new photos, even though I don’t have my shot of the day for my 365 project yet. I am also not posting the last few days of shots that I did take with the vignette app on my android phone. Still haven’t gotten around to vacuuming the living room (which I picked up yesterday) or putting away the clean laundry.

For a little while, it looked like I was going to take a nap on the couch, but now I don’t know. There are two new voice mail messages for me to listen to. There’s another room to pick up; there are stacks of reading material. There’s the personal email I haven’t responded to yet, and the work email I am trying not to think about. 

It is a Sunday afternoon, the first in two weeks I haven’t been on a plane during, and instead of doing any of those things that are a supposedly good use of my time, I’m lounging around, pecking this out on my iPad.

Tomorrow will be my last day at home until Friday evening, and I am trying not to think about that. 

I keep coming back to something in Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen, where she is talking about what practice is:

Our interest in reality is extremely low. No, we want to think. We want to worry through all of our preoccupations. We want to figure life out. And so before we know it we’ve forgotten all about this moment, and we’ve drifted off not thinking about something…

Sometimes, if I can do it, just sitting is the right thing to do.

Though there have been fewer than a dozen instances when I really thought I might pass out (so I had to sit down before I fell over) or be sick (so I held still and waited for it to pass), I stubbornly keep thinking it might happen.

Today was the first warm day in a long time, and it was ridiculously humid out. These conditions make it harder for the yoga room to be optimum humidity (I think it is 40%) and temperature (105 degrees). The room is optimized for the practice, not practitioner comfort — which means plenty of opportunities for my sneaky brain to lie to me about it what is going on.

When I find myself wondering if I am going to pass out or throw up, I know I’m probably not, because it would have happened already. What’s more likely is that I’m tired, I’m unfocused, I’m uncomfortable–in other words, I’m dwelling on how I feel.

Today I realized that my rough class was really an indicator of my progress.

Even though I have been practicing for awhile, there are still lots of things I can’t do. I can’t get my forehead to touch all the improbable things the instructors tell me to touch it to, and if you saw my attempt at triangle you’d never in a million years figure out that was the name of the posture. When I started, I could do only two basic things: stay in the room for the whole ninety minutes (harder than it sounds, when your brain is screaming at you to leave because it is so unreasonably fucking hot) and not cry (also harder than it sounds, because not being able to do any of the postures and feeling like crap is pretty demoralizing).

Now I can hold my arms over my head for the opening sequence, and I can hold them out straight for all three parts of awkward. I can touch my forehead to the floor in one posture, and to my knee in a couple of others. My camel is pretty good. Most of the time, I can manage to be still between the postures, like the instructors are always reminding us to be. Most of the time, I can follow the directions and remember that 100% right effort brings 100% benefit, even if my forehead isn’t where it’s supposed to be. When I do something new (like finally getting my forehead to knee) or do something well, it feels really good.

When I don’t do very well, it doesn’t feel so good. Like today: first set of triangle (that’s right, in Bikram class you do everything not once, but twice) I managed to keep my legs in sort of the right position, but the whole elbow in front of knee, other arm shooting up in the air make a triangle thing was just not happening. The instructor asked me if I had something going on with my hips — sometimes people don’t do what they usually do because of an illness or injury — and I said no. I said I wasn’t having my best day.

I forget exactly what he said in response, but it was something to the effect of making our best effort was important, that bringing that energy was needed, and it was good for the whole class.

He was right. I tried harder on the second set (though I still didn’t look like a triangle).

Here’s the evidence of my progress: I didn’t feel any resentment, anger, or shame when he called me out. (That wasn’t his intention, I’m sure it never is, but that doesn’t stop my sneaky brain from taking things that way.) Instead, I took it as I think it was intended: a chance for me to pause, refocus, consider what I was doing, and ask myself honestly if I was doing the best I could be doing at that moment.

I think accepting where I am in the moment — instead of reacting with shame or anger — will lead to even more progress.

If only it wasn’t so damn hot.

For some reason, this reminded me of Paul Isakson‘s presentation How to Wander With Purpose:

Viewing the presentation again, the connection wasn’t as immediately clear as it initially felt in my head. So I decided I should write this post, in hopes of finding clarification (and having what I’m learning stick).

I think it has to do with the freedom to make non-obvious connections. The time and space and openness to learn from outside your immediate sphere is not something many employers provide, and it can be hard to find the energy to do completely on your own. That doesn’t make it less vital. I’m lucky in that I have a job where I’m expected/provoked/encouraged to open my mind and see where things may go. That means I can do a lot of this “for work” and that gives me the energy to do it not for work. Another thing I’m realizing yet again is that for work/not work isn’t a distinction that always makes sense for me.

That’s ok. I’m wandering.

That’s what I say to myself every time I hear one of the “but people don’t read” arguments. People do. Sure, there is the tl;dr crowd, but the rest of us? We use Instapaper if we don’t have the time to finish, or pinboard, or some other bookmarking service. And most of the time, we really do go back and read the thing. My Instapaper account has a far shorter list of articles waiting for me than I have unread books in the house.

Lately I’m noticing a resurgence of reading online. I’m not sure what has sparked it. A fascination with a new form factor is no doubt part of the equation — using Flipboard makes a lot of web content more fun to read because it is an iPad app. It’s also more enjoyable because it is focused on the reading experience in a way that far too many websites are not.

One way to make “people don’t read” more accurate is to make it as difficult as possible for someone to read something on your site. First, shrink the font to an impossible to read at arms-length size. Then chop up content into pages, forcing a new page to load every two hundred words or so, so you can increase the number of page views where you serve up ads. Yes, make sure to liberally apply advertising: big obnoxious animated ads, ads that pop a box covering the content people came to see, little text ads sandwiched in between bits of real content, and my new favorite, ads that pop up in boxes when someone hovers over a link. Keep the real content to between two-thirds and one-half of the screen real estate. People won’t read if you make the experience terrible.

So there are all these new methods to make it less terrible, that make it fun, like Flipboard. Like Readability, which not only offers a vastly improved reading experience, but goes so far as to offer a different (and in my mind, more credible than most advertising) model for generating revenue from content published online.

There are so many tools to publish online — clearly we are all writers, of a sort — and yet I’m encouraged every time I see a new tool that makes it easy for people to publish on the web. Things like Posterous, which mainly relies on email to post stuff, meaning it’s accessible to anyone with an email account. Things like Pen, which is designed to let you publish “beautiful text based pages in seconds and share them with the world”.

Because the world that reads.

“This is the power of story, my friends — to ask us questions we can never answer right; to remind us of what we cannot bear to remember, to teach us what we cannot bear to know, and to make us fucking laugh right before we cry. To make us like it. To make us want to go back to the story well and do it all again.”

I am grateful Kelley Eskridge chooses to share so much on her blog.

[Click on the grid to see a larger version, or click through to the individual images: 1. the awesomeness of the shelves, 2. grasp, 3. sunspots, 4. purple tulips, 5. illuminations, epcot, 6. somewhere over the midwest, 7. city lights #1, 8. summer, 9. tenth avenue, 10. the dishes, 11. soapboxes and matchbooks, 12. fireworks]

I didn’t shoot as much as I wanted to, but I still found time to play around with a wide-angle lens, a scanner, a macro, my android phonecam, and a lensbaby as well as my usual nifty fifty. (I tested out some of the impossible project polaroid film too, but didn’t like any of the results well enough pick them to represent a month.)

This year, I’m planning a few photo projects, so I will be spending more time on photography. It makes me happy.

I like the idea of a taste graph much more than I like the idea of a social graph. Ok, let me amend that: I like the idea of Etsy graphing my taste far better than I like Facebook’s ham-handed attempts to own my social graph. Etsy isn’t saying it has the final word on what I like, it’s saying hey, if you like these things, you will probably like these things also. This is pretty convenient for me and for Etsy, because otherwise I’d probably never find these things.

Etsy isn’t overreaching — it isn’t saying it knows just what movie I should see or what book I should read next (perhaps Hunch could help me figure that out, or LibraryThing, or check-in taste profiler GetGlue). Chris Dixon, one of the founders of Hunch, thinks the next few years may be the golden age of graph innovation. I hope he’s right.

I am not looking for one graph to rule them all. I’m looking for tools/services that will make it easier for me to discover things I’d like, and things that will make is easy for me to share discoveries with other people without feeling like I’m pimping a service or spamming my friends. I want to plug in all sorts of info — my twitter stream, the bookmarks I save with pinboard — as well as answer questions, or set some parameters, and be happily surprised by how eerily accurate the suggestions served up are.

If a service seems useful enough, I’d pay for help managing/sharing my graphs and the graphs of others. That is one of the things I use twitter for, albeit in a clunky sort of way. I think there is much room to innovate in this space, if people can get past the build-an-audience-get-lots-of-eyeballs-for-advertising model. That model is broken. It’s not that well done. (Facebook frequently serves up completely irrelevant ads, such as one for a dating service for folks older than I am, despite knowing my age and that I am married.) It’s boring. It’s not adding any value.

I am increasingly mindful of the notion that if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. I don’t want to be a product, though I may want help in finding great products, or telling people I know about great products. Folks who can make the distinction and build a service that puts me in charge of my information and the information about my connections — I want to see what they let me do and build with my graphs, what they make possible or just easy that was impossible or impossibly difficult before.