GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • Berol Draughting 314 Pencil

    If brands are an emotional connection, this one grabbed me while laying buttery blacks on ED11A drawings during my freshman year at Berkeley.

    A few months ago, my mom returned old pencils that I left with them after college. That night, my daughter was using this round burgundy pencil with a thick graphite core in the living room.

    In spite of the two decade hiatus, a warm fuzzy feeling swept over me. I was surprised at the strength of the reaction.

    It’s just a pencil.

    What a fine pencil!

    Unfortunately, Berol is no more.

    What will be the nostalgia brands for our kids? 2056 is just around the corner.

    ䷇䷯

  • The White T

    He’s got a crew neck; mine is a v-neck. Same difference.

    The boy is wearing a white T this morning.

    I like white T’s. It’s what I wear.

    There’s nothing as cute as a little man dressed like 爸爸. Especially when you’re 爸爸.

    (Actually, wrong. It was cuter when he was a baby in his sister’s pink onesies. Poor guy didn’t know any better while defying gender norms.)

    He’s starting to get picky about his clothes. When he grows up, he’ll dress better than his daddy.

    But for now, I’ll take him dressing like me.

  • Disneyland in the Kitchen Living Room

    It started innocently, pushing the boy around the house on the tricycle. To mix it up, I counted down from ten and took off like a rocket.

    The girl heard him laughing and wanted to join the fun.

    The boy didn’t want to share but learned that half is better nothing when we stopped playing with him.

    We started zooming across the floor, again and again.

    While waiting for her turns, my daughter started riding their plasma car. She wove between the scattered trampoline, tent, and slide. With this spark, we pushed and pulled the furniture to create a second ride that weaved through the living room and kitchen.

    Disneyland at Home.

    The Plasma Boat Cruise was a figure-8 circuit. It started with a leisurely River of Animals, passed the Drawing Station and slid underneath the (dining) Table Mountain, next to the Aladdin’s Cave (tent). It rolled through the Cooking Zone and Frozen Land, looped through the Furniture Alley (with the trampoline, slide, reading chair, and ottoman), baked through the Sun Canyon next to the patio door, flowed through the Gorge of Chairs, dug under the Snow Tunnel and we were back at the beginning.

    In the meantime, the Rocket would take off. When the Cruise had ended, the tricycle would be ready to go again. The riders would switch and do it all over again.

    This wasn’t the real thing. But the kids had fun, and I ate a tastier (and much cheaper) home-cooked breakfast before heading upstairs for work.

    See you in Anaheim.

    Someday.

  • Plasma Car, PlaSmart Toys, 2003

    The car moves when the steering bar is wiggled back and forth. This bar is connected to the front wheels and the ocillating rotation propels the car forward.

    The boy didn’t grok the gimmick, but he enjoyed using his feet to scoot around the expansive tile open floor plan of my in-law’s house.

    That was fun eough, but the car proved its value last summer.

    Our daughter leapt off a dining chair and landed awkwardly.

    Her foot swelled.

    It didn’t warrant a doctor visit, but she had to stay off her feet.

    We carried her around for a day before the epiphany hit us – we have is an arm powered locomotion device!

    The kids loved this impromptu wheelchair. They would squeeze together to ride around the house. Sometimes she’d steer as he faced towards the back. Other times, he’d squeeze up in front to be the a taxi driver for his fare.

    And that’s when he finally learned how to properly drive the plasma car.

    This was the last Offerup purchase we made before the world shut down in 2020. It was nice to get this toy on discount at offerup, but this would have been worth it at full price.

    I wonder when we’ll start thrifting again.

  • Toe Shoes, Vibram

    I bought this pair on sale at the REI in Houston. I still have them now, so you can imagine how little use they got over the past ten years.

    Last week, I started using them to walk around the neighborhood.

    Then I realized I’d never gone off-road with these shoes. So I took a three-hour stroll in the hills behind my house.

    The first thing I realized was that I was landing too hard on my heels instead of the ball of my foot. I had adjusted properly for the pavement, but the rocky texture of the trail needed an even lighter touch.

    Over the past two years, we’ve spent most of my time at home barefoot. I’ve never been a fan of shoes and I always took them off when I could. In Berkeley, I would walk around town barefoot (youthful craziness), but it’s been a long time since I’ve walked around without padding.

    The coolest thing about not having padding in my toe shoe was that it pushed me to go off-trail to look for softer ground. That lead to some interesting landscapes and a sketchy moment when I suddenly realized the top of the ridge was a sheer drop at the other side – while a bee was chasing me along!

    But it all worked out OK. I have a slight bit of soreness under my feet but otherwise enjoyed the experience.

    These shoes are a keeper. I’m not sure I’d pay full retail to purchase another pair, but after my current pair of Crocs wears out, these toe shoes will become my regular going-out slipper. In other words, they aren’t going to make it to twenty years.

    The Sunday after writing that draft, I went on a walk around the neighborhood. It was a busy day so I only planned a quick jaunt around the subdivision. However, my feet had an itch wanting to go off-road. So I obliged, spending a couple of hours off-trail, going up and then down a couple of arroyos. It was glorious.

    It was fun to have an object on my body demand that it be used the way it was intended to be used (as a sword thirsty for blood). We make our tools, and sometimes they make us.

  • Taoism: An Essential Guide, Eva Wong, 2011

    Growing up in a Christian home, I didn’t learn about Chinese religions. The one thing I remember is my mom telling me that the Taoists are really crazy.

    When I started dabbling in Eastern philosophy a few years ago, I thought she was talking about the slippery mysticism of the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi.

    My mom was a history major so I wouldn’t be surprised if she was forced to painfully slog through a philosophy class in college. But I also suspect she saw many religious ceremonies growing up in Taiwan.

    The philosophy might be mindblowing, but wait till you check out its practices. This book described a series of practices that run between wild and completely bonkers.

    Admittedly, a Bible story (take something as basic as Christmas) is totally ridiculous for someone who was not raised in the hegemony of Christian myth. So to be fair, all religions are pretty far out.

    But we entered the modern age to get beyond everyone’s superstition. I’m not sold on the intricate cosmology of Christianity, and there’s no reason to adopt the talismans and esoteric exercises on Taoism.

    This book did its job. It gave me enough of an overview to realize that I don’t need to investigate this religion further. Admittedly Taoists are a heterodox bunch so I’m certain there is a more sedate sect that might suit my preferences.

    But time is limited, so I’ll just sample the philosophy, proverbs, and wisdom in all these traditions, and leave the religion to their participants, just as I let my parents worship in peace.

    TLDR: Here is a quick overview of Taoism on youtube…while you’re at it, he also put together a great takedown of Hollywood depictions of Asian “honor”.

  • Laser Printer

    My daughter was playing hospital with all their stuffed animals lined up on the bed.

    She wrote up a check-in form and asked me to make a few copies, assuming we’d do it by hand.

    I told her I was going to do it on the computer. So she sat next to me as I fired up the machine and laid it out in Bluebeam. Bluebeam isn’t really a desktop publishing platform, but it works well enough.

    After we were happy with the layout, we printed out a draft copy.

    That’s when her mind was blown.

    She just entered the age of mechanical reproduction.

    After a couple drafts and we were happy with the layout, we took a break to watch the first half hour of The Penguins of Madagascar and eat dinner.

    After dinner, she wanted to get back to her hospital check-in forms. At the bottom of the form was a clipart illustration of kids standing on a rainbow. She wanted to color each of the forms.

    So the kids and I spent the rest of the evening coloring these forms. We finished the forms but not the movie. That’s fine. It will be here tomorrow.

    It’s a little strange. She’s seen me use the printer countless times for all kinds of uses for home and work. I guess it just never registered as a tool for her life until it became her own project (she’s seen me use it many times for her schoolwork). It was amusing to listen to her marvel about the magic of the printer. I can’t remember when my dad bought a dot-matrix printer. I wonder if it blew my mind.

    Parenting gives you a sparkles of magic amidst a background of drudgery. This site let’s me record those moments.

  • Upanishads, Vyasa (Vernon Katz, Thomas Egenes, trans.) 2015

    Last year, I listened to the library’s copy of the Upanishads during a 3-hour 10K hike in the hills behind our house.

    It may have been appropriate to experience this work as an audiobook because these were originally oral texts, but it was a slog. Unlike the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads are fourteen separate documents and it was difficult to keep attention without the structure of a story.

    Given their canonical status, it’s my fault for not properly appreciating this experience. Then again, maybe the translator shares some of the blame (I found the introduction to the book incredibly dry).

    Or possibly, these teachings should be sampled one line at a time, slowly pondered in a deliberate fashion.

    The audiobook format is great for lighter works that wash past the consciousness, often at 1.5x speed. Self-help books flitter into the consciousness to create an illusion of learning that will be forgotten in a month.

    The Upanishads are definitely not fluffy self-help fodder. These texts were orally transmitted from father to son. Something that required this much effort must have embodied deep value to survive the attrition of millennia.

    It was too much to digest in an endless stream, even at 1.0x speed.

    In all, I don’t regret the listen. But this was the barest of introductions. If I want to get anything substantive out of the Upanishads, I’ll have to sit down and read it slowly.

    But if the past year of inaction is any indication, I doubt will ever happen.

  • Iron and Bronze clashed as Jade reigned supreme.

    I stayed obsessed with the Max game board, so here is another version, with 1.5″ squares, which is a better fit for our pieces from Animal upon Animal.

    Max-Board-Letter-220306.5Download

  • Red and pink foot mittens were scattered in the corridor.

    I made a game board for Max to play with my Animal Upon Animal pieces. Originally it was hand drawn, then on legal paper in AutoCAD, and finally now in lettersized format. This is version 9. Lots of little tweaks here and there, but I’m happy with it.

    I’ve never been a great graphic designer, but a some time and many iterations makes me passable.

    Max Board Letter-220305.9Download