Published

A bird

I came across a sparrow yesterday on the busy corner near B&A’s daycare on the way to pick them up. It looked like a tiny pile of leaves on the concrete, and people kept coming *this close* to stepping on it by accident. I realized what it was in exactly the same moment as a dad and his kid three steps ahead of me, the little boy started whispering worriedly. I picked it up gently and put it in the nearest reasonable spot, a very tall planter with a lot of greenery. It was like nothing, a little mound of trembling lint with claws. I know you’re not supposed to move stunned birds but I figured there was no way it wasn’t going to get flattened like a pancake otherwise. And it made sense, I was literally seconds away from daycare where they had a bathroom right by the door and I could wash my hands.

In the few remaining steps to daycare, I was instantly overwhelmed by a huge wave of deja vu and dread. I suddenly thought, “bird flu…” and was mentally thrown back in to the earliest days of the pandemic when everything was dire and nothing was certain, when we were wiping our groceries down with bleach wipes, wearing masks when passing someone on a trail in the woods, living with a permanent empty lump lodged somewhere between our throats and the base of our skulls and thinking, “Surely this isn’t right? Am I doing something wrong? Is this what I’m supposed to do to stay safe, to keep everyone safe, to make this go away?”

I washed my hands for 40 seconds and tried to stop thinking about it, but the feeling lingered the rest of the night, this existential what-if-I-just-seriously-fucked-up feeling, and it’s still sort of present now. I know it’s extreme but also, life feels pretty extreme right now.

I picked up AB and BB, and told BB about the bird. We walked up to the planter and found it still there, but under a few more leaves. It was gone by the same time the next day.

Published

“Don’t want a song”

I put BB to bed last night for the first time in a little while and asked him what song he wanted me to sing, as usual. He said, “I don’t want a song.” A little bit of me died.

I think it’s because I don’t get to put him to bed often due to feeding AB. It’s kind of like holding him in my arms too, I couldn’t pick him up for most of the time I was pregnant with AB and then now, he doesn’t want to be picked up. Just the first of many letting go-s.

Edit 26 February 2025: Last night, I was singing all sorts of nonsense to AB while putting her to bed. BB overheard me and asked why she gets lots of songs. I told him I thought he didn’t like it. So maybe the secret is a little good old fashioned jealousy, then I’ll get to sing to him again.

Published

Overheard on 7th

I was walking to the grocery store just now with AB in the carrier. A man bumped me accidentally rushing after a woman about his age, maybe both mid-70s. He grabbed her by the shoulder and turned her to him.

“Where are you going?!”

Silence.

“You want to go home?”

She nods.

Gently turning her the opposite direction, “But home is this way.”

Published

Hello again

Red dragonfly on a wooden rail in the sun

It’s been a while! My site has fallen majorly by the wayside which both feels appropriate (see first point below) and makes me a bit sad. There’s a lot I’ve already forgotten. I want to analyze a bit more why I haven’t been posting… but that’s something I need to think a bit more about first.

A few notes to catch up on major points, and then hopefully back to posting semi-regularly.

Read more

Published

Shower thought on trust

The more time passes, the more I think that establishing relationships, or repairing imperfect ones, is mostly about establishing mutual trust. Friends, work colleagues, family members, anyone really. Obviously a heck of a lot of other factors impact whether or not the relationship is enjoyable. But without trust, it’s really hard to maintain most of those other factors (respect, affection, communication, mindfulness, etc).

Been thinking about this a lot lately in the context of building and maintaining happy, healthy teams, but then realized that it applies in a lot of other areas as well.

Next question: how do you establish trust? It has something to do with demonstrating vulnerability, particularly if you’re in the more “powerful” position within a relationship… (Important to remember that power is the sum total of a bajillion possible factors; age, personality, org structure, gender, personal network, race, and much more.) But that’s not a fully-baked thought, there’s definitely more to it than that.

Published

Team retreat at the Eames Archives and Ranch

Last week, the Eames Institute Digital Product team got together at the newly-opened Eames Archives in Richmond, CA and the currently-under-renovation Ranch in Petaluma, CA. Llisa Demetrios – one of the Eames grandchildren, a founder of the Eames Institute, and our Chief Curator – gave DP a private tour of the Archives, and we walked from one end of the Ranch to the other guided by Farm Manager David Evershed, Director of Ranch Operations Benjamin Godfrey, and VIP (Very Important Puppy) Tipsy. Incredible to explore and meet them + so many other EI folks IRL.

I won’t share pics of the Archives since my photos either have people in (I don’t like sharing faces without permission) or are basically low-qual versions of the much better photos you can find on the website. And I won’t share much about what DP got up to discussion-wise, hoping to share our progress in a different format elsewhere soon.

But here are a few snaps of the Ranch as well as some of my favorite tidbits + moments.

Huge oak trees framing the Turnbull barn at the Eames Ranch in Petaluma, CA

Looking west to the Turnbull barn at the Eames Ranch in Petaluma, CA

Read more

Published

Bell ringing as abstraction, exercise, and communion

Can’t remember how we got talking about it, but another member of the Brooklyn Conservatory Chorale told me that she’s very in to English Change Ringing.

I thought I hadn’t heard of it before, but I have heard it, many times since I lived over there for 10 years. Listen to an example from St Paul’s on YouTube. I didn’t know it had a name, guess I always assumed it was sort of random.

If you listen to it closely you can start to recognize patterns. And if you live in the US, you might realize how this sound feels somewhat historical, not something that we hear frequently even in places with lots of churches. It is somewhat-to-very rare in the US depending upon where you live (see map of North American bell towers).

I started poking around online. For a concise description of English Change Ringing, you can’t beat the one on the New York Trinity Ringers website. Would love to go hear their bells some time.

But for a wonderfully in-depth presentation, it’s worth reading the article “Campanologomania” by Katherine Hunt published in issue 53 of Cabinet magazine in spring 2014.

(Incidentally, how have I never come across Cabinet before? “We believe that curiosity is the very basis of ethics insofar as a deeper understanding of our social and material cultures encourages us both to be better custodians of the world and at the same time allows us to imagine it otherwise.” Spot on. I hope they’re not done for… The last issue was winter ‘21 / spring ‘22, and the last event was in late 2020 as far as I can tell.)

In the article, Hunt goes through the origins of English Change Ringing as almost a drunken group pastime on idle bells, to a sort of obsession by folks – men, really – of many classes, to something that was seen as somewhat lowly due to the physical exertion it required, to the qualities it shares with modern twelve-tone music and the invention of the dumbbell (quite literally a dumb bell).

It’s hard to describe how physically in-tune the bell ringers must be to achieve the many permutations in a multi-hour peal. Hunt says:

While change ringers must understand the shape of the particular method they are ringing, they do not follow written notation for each and every change. Nor do they memorize the individual changes. Rather, the practice relies on the ringers internalizing the patterns of the method, perhaps by looking at notation that shorthands the whole method, showing only the key moments at which the permutations change course in order to exhaust all the possible orders. Ringers know principally by doing: they anticipate when two bells will have to swap places in the following round, and they feel their way as a group through the ringing of all the orders of the rows. Change ringing’s linguistic potential may have been exploited by Stedman and Mundy, but in the bell-tower it is a sweaty, communal, and profoundly corporeal activity.

That reliance on communality reminds me of many Musarc performances, though those are of course much more contemporary and experimental (and choral, not bells!).

Anyways, clearly there is something very attractive about this to me… The trouble is the meeting lengths and frequency, it would be really tough to get involved at this point in my life. Maybe something for when I’m 50+.

***

Side note: I was about to post a link to Outhwaites of Hawes, a traditional ropemaking business that started before 1840. The building is their workshop and also effectively houses a museum. It was lovely to walk through there and see the rope being made, including the incredible ropes required for change ringing. But sadly, it looks like they closed almost exactly a year ago.