I couldn’t believe how hard it was.

The program is simple – you run longer and longer each time, until your body is accustomed to running for 35 minutes at a time. The first week has you pairing one-minute runs with one-minute walks for 16 minutes. By the third week, you’re running 3-5 minutes at a time. By the end of the seventh week, you’re up to a single 25-minute run.

In the past – as many of us have – I’d have accepted this 5k challenge by jumping right into a 5k run. Just do it. No guts, no glory. No shins, either, as they’d have died the next day.

In running, there’s no concept of all or nothing. Instead, you must respect time. You must earn your place. And if you do, running is no longer hard. It just becomes part of what you do. It finds a niche in your routine and takes root.

There’s a life lesson in there, somewhere.

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.

Tons of my friends were crossing into that weird level of adulthood, where nothing seemed off limits anymore. We had just moved back to Sioux Falls, and she had come over to see the new house, and we probably made a date to go hang out; to head to the bar and to do the things that over-21 year olds do. To drink. To enjoy each other’s company. To be friends.

It was old news to us by that point. I was 24. We had become the wise sages of bar life. But she had just turned 21, and I owed her a beer.

And then, she was gone. Just like that.

I don’t remember the circumstances, and I don’t need to. I remember the important part: Beka, our friend, was in a car accident. She was thrown from the car. She was airlifted to the hospital. And she died.

She died.

She was 21.

Innocence gets dashed in any of a thousand ways. The unlucky see it dashed while they’re still young. They see it dashed as mere children through any combination of divorce or abuse or space shuttle disaster. It’s the first path toward adulthood, the understanding that nothing is perfect, and that things can be shitty at times. It’s the tragedy of youth: the inevitable realization that nothing lasts forever, and that the shelters our parents help us build are fragile, corrupted and rusting before we even get a chance to reinforce them on our own.

Yet, others hold that innocence for as long as they can. Those are the strong ones. Those are the ones that confront a dying parent with optimism, who don’t much care for the idea that death is an option, and who effectively jam the gears of adulthood through sheer will.

Beka never lost that innocence. Her smile was genuine. Her enthusiasm was contagious. Her spirit acted as if it was looped up on goofballs, always pushing for more. Always looking for fun. Always happy. Always brilliant.

That was Beka. That’s just who she was.

Beka never lost that innocence. But all of us – all of her friends, and all of her family – after that day, at least – did. We were thrust into the court of adulthood, ready or not. We could no longer count our friends by those who would show up for a party – we now had friends who could never show up, because they had passed away.

Days later, we’d spend a cold night in a Catholic church. Some of us never figured out whether we should be kneeling or praying, and we found it easy to pick out the Protestants through their insistance on continuing the Lord’s Prayer. We giggled to ourselves because that’s all we could do. That’s all you fucking can do when your friend dies. That’s all you can do to stay sane. Because, damn it, she was just a kid, and that’s all we could muster to even begin to understand the cruelty of her death.

All we could do is laugh. It was so ridiculous, otherwise.

The day we found out, Kerrie and I were in Rochester, visiting Kerrie’s sister. I got a call from my best friend Jim – one of Beka’s closest friends. He was grave. He had obviously been crying. And he told us the news.

“Beka is dead,” he said.

“What? Shit. I’m sorry,” I responded.

“Don’t be sorry. She was your friend, too,” Jim answered.

Just like that, I knew what we had lost.

When it came down to it, we weren’t close to her – not like others in our group were close to her, at least. But, then again, we were. There was no grey area with Beka – if you were her friend, you were her FRIEND. And every damned person was her friend. Because she was damned good at being the best person she could be.

I don’t think of her a lot anymore, and I know that’s a symptom of moving on. I incorrecly assume this is because we weren’t incredibly close. That’s not true.

In reality, I don’t think of her because she reminds me of my loss of innocence. Others mourn, while I would rather forget. I still wish I could go back, sometimes, to when life was without problems, where we were still naive. Beka’s passing changed all of that. She did us a favor, in one way. She forced us to grow up.

When I think about it, though, I DO miss her. I can’t help it. It’s ultimately her lasting legacy. We miss her an awful lot, but we have to move on. Not without her, but in honor of her.

It’s hard. It’s still hard.

Now, here I sit. Nine years and one day after the fact. And I still haven’t gotten her that beer.

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.

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.)

And now I can’t find a video clip as evidence.

And I’m afraid it was all a dream.

Please don’t let this be a dream. Please let the Lionel Richie family be real.

Please?

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.

Favorite Albums from 2011

• The Decemberists – The King is Dead
• Doomtree – No Kings
• The Antlers – Burst Apart
• Jay-Z/Kanye West – Watch the Throne
• R.E.M. – Collapse Into Now
• tUnE-YarDs – w h o k i l l
• Bon Iver – Bon Iver
• The Mountain Goats – All Eternals Deck
• Damn Your Eyes – Damn Your Eyes
• Fucked Up – David Comes to Life

Favorite Album from 2010 that would have topped my list if it had come out in 2011 and not December 2010

• Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Favorite Albums from before 2011 that I didn’t pay attention to until 2011 (Non-Kanye Edition)

• Titus Andronicus – The Monitor
• Michael Jackson – Thriller
• The Long Winters – Putting the Days to Bed
• Ween – Live at Somerville Theater 1997 bootleg
• Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross – The Social Network Soundtrack

Favorite Vinyl Purchased in 2011

• Braid – Frame and Canvas
• Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks
• R.E.M. – Life’s Rich Pageant
• Refused – The Shape of Punk to Come
• Split Lip – Fate’s Got a Driver
• Pixies – Doolittle
• Texas is the Reason/Promise Ring – split 7″
• Jim Croce – Greatest Hits

Favorite Albums from 1997

(As listed in my remembrance of the year in music, 1997)

• Modest Mouse – The Lonesome Crowded West
• Promise Ring – Nothing Feels Good
• Built to Spill – Perfect From Now On
• Get Up Kids – Four Minute Mile
• Guilt – Further
• Ben Folds Five – Whatever and Ever Amen
• Ween – The Mollusk
• Snapcase – Progression Through Unlearning
• Floodplain – Eightpennygalvinized
• Radiohead – OK Computer

Favorite Hardcore Punk Albums

(As listened to during my hardcore punk renaissance this past summer)

• By the Grace of God – For the Love of Indie Rock
• Snapcase – Progression Through Unlearning
• Quicksand – Manic Compression
• 108 – Songs of Separation
• Refused – The Shape of Punk to Come

Most Disappointing Album of 2011

• Braid – Closer to Closed EP

From Paul Flannery’s Twitter Feed:

“Chemistry is something that you don’t just throw in a frying pan and mix it up with another something and throw something on top of that and then fry it up and put in a tortilla and put it in microwave, heat it up, give it to you and expect it to taste good.

You know?

If y’all don’t know what I’m talking about then you can’t cook and this doesn’t concern you.”

I know. Exactly. EXACTLY.

I can’t WAIT until TNT hires KG after he retires. YOU’RE ON NOTICE, SHAQ.

From “A Content Methodology Primer”:

It’s romantic to think that content work is an art, all brandy, pipes, and wood grain. But it’s not. It’s a process. A messy, sticky, multi-disciplinary process that begs for structure, consistency, and guidance.

That’s a daunting task. Content wants to be messy. It wants to roll around in the mud. It wants to be gross. Our job is to pull it together—to take the guesswork out of creating and curating it—and to treat content work as something closer to a science.

And, if you’re NOT into that, you might enjoy this video of a mullet/mustache combo whistling “Georgia on My Mind.”