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Some thoughts about making a Donald Judd-esque table

Most of the NYC crew from the Eames Institute took a little field trip to 101 Spring Street yesterday. There was a lot I found beautiful, and a few things that gave me pause.

But one of the things I most enjoyed inspecting was Donald Judd’s big 14-seater whitewood table in the kitchen / dining space on the second floor. Clearly well-loved, and slightly more rough-and-ready than some of his other furniture. It was good fun to have a close look at the dining chairs too, though I’m more interested in the form there. Don’t look too comfortable.

This is a very broad overview of some points to consider if I ever want to make a Judd-esque table.

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“Power and safety are not the same thing”

It’s been an awful, heartbreaking October.

I don’t really know what to say about the conflict in Gaza and Israel. Part of it is that I don’t feel like I know enough. Both about all of the micro and macro events that have led up to this, and what’s going on in this moment. And I don’t really feel justified to share my feelings. It seems performative considering I have no personal ties and am many thousands of miles away.

But Eli did a great job articulating his feelings in this post, and I wanted to share that here since it is the one thing I’ve read that most closely mirrors my current thoughts.

It all feels a bit like staring in to the void.

“Tragedy” is almost a meaningless word, with the frequency it occurs.

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Manifesting cake

All of the birthdays in our little family fall within a 15 day period in the middle of the summer. There was a lot of cake around for nearly a month. And then we went to the UK to visit family who kindly wanted to celebrate all of our birthdays, so we did it all over again.

Now, B asks for cake after nearly every meal, sometimes for breakfast. Obviously we’ve been trying to phase it out, explaining that there’s none left. But there have been enough times when he’s asked for it at random moments and it has been around. So there’s no way he’s going to chance not asking for it.

This was the conversation the other day at his Nana’s table during lunch.

“KEHK??”

“No buddy, there’s no cake.”

“… Happy bur-day?”

“No buddy, there’s no cake. It’s no one’s birthday.”

“…… Happy bur-day Nana?”

“… 🤦🏻‍♂️”

It had been my birthday, Sam’s birthday, and his birthday already. But we hadn’t celebrated Nana’s yet, so it was a logical ask to be fair.

I asked him what his favorite song was yesterday, and he started singing Happy Birthday. (This was 100% a ploy for cake, his actual favorite song is “Hey Jude” because he likes to yell the NAH NAH NAH part.)

He’s still getting over jet lag since we arrived back from the UK last weekend, lots of 5:30am-ish wake-ups. This morning, he wandered sleepily out of his bedroom to go use the potty and the first thing he said was, “Bur-day?”

I’m pretty sure he thinks he can manifest cake.

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A long-overdue work update

It’s been a wild few months professionally.

Earlier this year, I was asked to be the Engineering Manager at SuperHi and started in that role in May. That same month, I gave a talk at Parsons on the invitation of Eric Li and Michael Fehrenbach for their Typography and Interaction students in the MPS CD program. Maybe a month or two ago, SuperHi CEO and friend Rik Lomas and I were interviewed by Aja Singer for the recently-released first episode of her new podcast “Interview Stack” which offers a “deep dive on the engineering hiring process”. She’s a great interviewer, I’d keep an eye on her work.

And then over two thirds of us were laid off from SuperHi yesterday!

It’s unfortunate but understandable given the circumstances, it’s a tough world out there for startups right now. I really wish nothing but the best for the remaining SuperHi team and hope they’re able to reach the lofty goals that we set for ourselves. It’s a great platform and community with so much potential. I recommend checking out the courses and workshops that we recently released including one on generative art, one about Squarespace, and another on integrating AI on the web. There should be a lot more to come soon, SuperHi’s newsletter is the best way to get updates if you’re interested.

We achieved so much together. Personally, I’m really proud to have improved a lot of the accessibility practices, project management, QA, knowledge transfer processes, and documentation at SuperHi, even though some of that isn’t publicly visible just yet. I’m proud of the code I wrote and the languages and frameworks that I learned while there, going from working largely with CSS, HTML, JS, and PHP before to working heavily with TypeScript, Next.js, and React across multiple interconnected projects in a monorepo. I’m also really proud of the quality of our collaboration both across SuperHi in general and particularly within the Engineering team specifically. We shared extremely trusting working relationships which isn’t easy, especially when working remotely.

It’s sad to not be a part of that anymore, and it’s tough when you’ve been working towards a goal so hard for so long and then suddenly the next morning is a blank page.

But I am looking forward to pottering a little. A little blog gardening, improving performance on this site (when did it get so effing slow?! the cobbler’s children have no shoes etc. etc.), maybe finally setting up the bookshelf site I always wanted to make. Will have to do a little bit of LinkedIn cleanup. ::makes gagging sound:: And I had the last week of summer scheduled off anyway so I’ll be spending that fully focused on B, probably wandering in and out of all the water features in every playground within a 5 mile radius.

If anyone has interesting opportunities to share, please give me a shout.

And please do share this with your friends. I think I’m looking for another software engineering role at a remote USA- or UK-based company, or in-person at a NYC-based company. But I’m going to think about it a little more and am aiming to post again soon with more specifics.

Of course I wasn’t the only one, there is a lot of other ex-SuperHi talent out in the world now too including top-notch designers, razor-sharp teachers, meticulous engineers, brilliant strategists, and community management geniuses. I’m not going to post names here just yet because I want to verify who would like what shared, but if you have any opportunities along those lines, send them my way and I’ll make sure they reach the right eyeballs.

Now, time to relax a little during our remaining few days visiting family in the UK. Below are the flowers that my mother in law picked from her garden for me after she heard the news. I wish Smell-O-Vision was a thing, because these are pretty fantastic.

I’ll be back in Brooklyn on Sunday. If you happen to be nearby in the coming weeks, let’s get a coffee or go for a stroll in Prospect Park or something.

Until soon x

A small bouquet of pink and purple sweet peas in a glass bottle on a white kitchen counter

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An important memory, gone

A friend of mine is having a baby imminently and asked about my experience having an induction, so I opened up Apple Notes. I spent much of my extremely limited and precious “me” time in those early post-birth days writing a long note about my experience, knowing I would want to be able to refer back to it both for myself and friends. I began writing it early in the induction, late at night on Misoprostol when I couldn’t sleep. I continued it as B was asleep on my chest in the wee hours of the morning after he was born and finished it in the days after when we had caught up with our doula about a few missing details.

Over half of it is gone.

I have no idea what could have happened to it. It ends mid-sentence, with “Eventually things got too intense, so we made”, and then nothing.

Maybe I never finished it? Maybe I just thought I did. A lot is very muddled in my head from those early days after his birth, but this feels so clear. Besides making sure that B was happy and healthy, there is very little that I made an effort to “get done” in late July 2021. Except for this note.

It feels pretty devastating. I tried checking old versions by restoring from a Time Machine backup (Sam found an extremely helpful article), but the closest backup from mid-August 2021 looks the same as my current stunted version.

Then again, when I look at the “last edited” date at the top of the note, it reads 11:23pm two days after B’s birth. I would still have been in the hospital then, I couldn’t have finished it by that time.

Maybe I did imagine it. I’m so sure it existed.

It doesn’t matter though, it feels like a loss all the same.

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Like a cat

B is like a cat. He wants up, then immediately wants down. Hands me something, like my clog, and then immediately wants it back. Then he’ll run around with two sets of tongs for a while. (To be fair, I don’t think cats can do that.)

He’s started learning animal noises.

“What does a snake say?”

“How does a mouse sigh?”

“What does a horse say?”

And he’s finding his voice. I shouldn’t laugh. I think I’m supposed to stay serious when he gets so loud (we have lovely neighbors we would like to keep), but I can’t help it. Extended vocal techniques. Meredith Monk has nothing on him.

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How and why I stopped freelancing

A quick disclaimer: This is NOT an article about how to find a full-time job. There are a million posts about that online. And anyways, beyond the general advice1, I’m not sure how useful those articles usually are anyways. Every person’s path to a job is super different.

This is about the steps I took to make the transition from independent work to full-time employment as smooth as possible for my clients, my collaborators, my new employer, and most importantly myself. It’s also about the thought process behind that decision.

In many ways, this is all a long explanation of the feelings behind this earlier post.

It wasn’t without stress, but it worked out pretty well with a lot of prior planning and communication.

Wispy clouds against a blue sky

Before I go in to how, a little about why.

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Against cynicism

I’ve had a post languishing for years in my drafts folder, return to it every once in a while but never feel like it’s quite right. For one thing it feels way too long. It’s about cynicism, about how I feel like it’s one of the most toxic, pervasive things both on a very personal level and also when you look at society as a whole. When I re-read it, it feels too preachy, or starry-eyed, or whatever.

Anyway, Nick Cave replied to a fan back in April this year about this very topic. He said it all way, way better than I ever could.

Read Issue #190 of The Red Hand Files

A quote from his letter:

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.

Accompanying his letter is a photo of an artwork by Philip Guston. Guston was a self-taught Canadian American representational painter. He often explored dark themes in his work, including himself and his own mental health issues, using primarily a limited monochrome and pinky-red palette in his later work. A lot of his paintings are almost cartoon-like except for the very rough linework. Klansmen feature heavily in some of his most famous paintings. He deemed these self-portraits. They aren’t explicitly violent per se, but they are menacing. They depict the banality of evil, how it lurks inside.

The figure in the piece that Nick Cave chose has a hood, but it has no pointed peak. They have a slightly pained expression (hard to figure out how Guston achieved that with such minimal brushwork) and are criss-crossed with dotted lines through their head and torso as if they have been sewn back together over and over. There is vivid red smeared on the hood, a head wound.

It’s a good image choice.

I can’t figure out where it is from, reverse image search turns up nothing. Maybe it’s a detail. I’ll keep searching.

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First trip to Michigan

A large, iridescent bubble with a faint reflection of a house floating in front of a leafy green tree

We took B to the cottage for the first time. The weather was a bit grey and cool, but it turns out we were lucky. A huge storm ripped through right after we left which took down a tree and made it impossible to reach, also knocked out the power for two days. Followed by temps in the 90s, and B hates heat like that. So it worked out!

Lots of sitting on Great-Grandpa’s bench swing, massive bubbles, sunsets, good food, playing with balls bigger than he is. And we got two afternoons at the beach on the lake. Turns out he absolutely loves cold water. He would crawl up to it, be shocked by a small wave, and then hastily crawl away laughing his head off. And repeat, for 30 minutes. The only things that would distract him was trying to eat pebbles, and shoveling sand into his mouth.

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One way to fall asleep

Lying in bed for ages thinking “why can’t I get to sleep”, then I finally realize every muscle in my body, every fiber of my being is tense.

How does it surprise me every time? A mindful body scan usually does the trick.

***

When I was a kid, probably around 5, I distinctly remember this moment where I was lying in my twin bed staring at the doorway and suddenly thinking, “How do you fall asleep? … I don’t know how to fall asleep!”

I realized that I had never actually experienced the moment of falling asleep (of course not, I was half-asleep at that point) and started overthinking it. It became this process I didn’t understand, and then I was just lying there wide-eyed not understanding and confused about what to do next.

I’m not sure if it was that night or a few nights later, but I eventually asked my mom how to fall asleep. She looked at me and said, “… Um, just close your eyes?” I did, and to me the next day, it seemed like I had fallen asleep instantly. It felt like a revelation, that there was such a simple answer.

I sometimes notice nowadays, that moment between wakefulness and sleep.

Every once in a while I notice my thoughts getting weirder and more abstract and suddenly think, this is it. It’s quite an incredible state, nothing like it. I guess it’s lucid dreaming, but it’s so short… I try to stay in that state but it’s almost impossible, thinking about it wakes me up and leaning in to it makes me fall asleep.

Sometimes I get in to the same state upon waking, but unfortunately that’s usually because I’m coming out of a nightmare.