GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • 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

  • OPM.29 (notes on) The New West, Robert Adams, 1974

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    (notes on) The New West

    The Houston Public Library introduced me to three great books, The New West, Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places, and a third monograph that focused on reflections in the plate glass on New York City streets (but I haven’t been able to rediscover). All three books were from the 1970s and 1980s.

    The New West has kept its freshness ten years after I first discovered it, almost fifty years after publication. Even though the Rocky Mountains are a foreign place for me (the most interaction I’ve had with Denver is stretching my legs at its train station while riding the California Zephyr), the suburban scape is quite familiar.

    The tract homes are much like the simple homes I renovated in the Bay Area. I spent four years remodeling an old tract home in downtown Vegas. I now live next to freshly cleared new subdivisions in the desert. The book’s business strips mirror my grandparent’s avenues in the San Gabriel Valley. I can also see a central business (casino) district from our house, through the dusty haze of flatland. That same highway rolled through the foothills of Austin when I started dating my wife. It also runs through the desert towards Los Angeles.

    It is all so familiar, and yet half a century foreign. Different from what I know, but every element rhymes.

    The only misstep in this book is the introduction to the chapter “Tract and Mobile Homes”.

    Few of the new houses will stand in fifty years; linoleum buckles on countertops, and unseasoned lumber twists walls out of plumb before the first occupants arrive.

    I pulled up a copy of Google maps to verify this sour prediction. There have been some changes. Big trees stand tall where the land was scraped bare and fences now divide the properties. But the homes all remain, sometimes barely touched.

    I wonder if any of the current residents know that their abode is been featured in a photographic monograph? What would they think if they stumble across a print in a fancy gallery? Do they realize the artist fully expected them their homes would quickly disappear?

    However, our ability to predict the future is often half right. I followed up the house search by looking up his busy commercial strips. Almost all of them have changed. Sometimes there are wafts of the past with similar uses in new buildings, but American commerce is one of creative destruction.

    Those examples in this book were not spared. Only the church has remained.

    And so I see our future in Las Vegas. The streets will remain. These squat stucco boxes will survive. I doubt our trees will grow as tall, but I’m curious what our shopping centers will become in the second half of this new century.

    ~

    A Question

    What do you see in your crystal ball? What will stick around in fifty years?

    Hit reply and let’s chat!

    ~

    A Link

    The Growth Equation posted about the importance of physical constraints, especially for knowledge workers who deal in data all day. This is why I love this industry. Outside of academia, architects have to deal with physical reality, even if we aren’t forced to get our hands dirty.

    … and a photo.

    Nisei Grill, San Francisco, 1942, Dorothea Lange

    ~

    Thanks for reading the OPM letter! I’d love to have a conversation if you have any feedback. I hope you found some prompts to stretch your craft as a curious Owner PM. See you soon!

    Justus Pang, RA

  • Old boxes of books

    Once or twice a year, I dig through my fifteen boxes of books in the garage. Aside from the occasional late night web purchase, these are my most materialistic exercises.

    It’s ridiculous that I keep these books.

    The enlightened unattached person should discard all these material goods. Nine years in a box is proof that they are unnecessary.

    However, I love revisiting all these little gifts (burdens?) from my younger self. Books always carry a physical memory of the moment when they were acquired or when they were read.

    Books also carry hope for future knowledge. Mainly a vain hope; I’ve lugged some of these across the continent over two decades, from Berkeley to Houston to Vegas.

    One day, when we find our own house, I envision a big bookshelf with all these books in glorious display. Maybe that’s a vain hope too.

    But for now, I occasionally rescue a select few from the garage. At least those lucky volumes are a step closer to being read.

    Now where can I find time to read?

  • Hinduism, Mark W. Muesse, Great Courses, 2003

    Hinduism was the last of the great religions that I knew nothing about.

    I was raised Christian, which rhymes with the Abrahamic religions, aided by listening to a couple of books about Judaism and Islam. I’ve also dabbled with eastern philosophy over the past decade. My forays with Tai Chi have led to reading Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian texts. I’ve enjoyed those readings, though I reject all of their elaborate heavenly cosmologies.

    Twelve hours is a long period of time and a vanishingly short time limit to survey a great religion. Not knowing any better, I would this course did its job. It provided a rough overview of the religion, addressed some of its excesses, and provided some avenues for further exploration. It covered a wide variety of topics and dispelled the foreign exoticness of Hinduism. This course shows that all of us are trying to take care of ourselves and our own while feeling some sense of fulfillment.

    It is not easy for an atheist raised as a monotheist to relate to a polytheistic worldview. However, this course makes such a mindset more understandable. I don’t agree with the tenets that have created a rigid caste system, but I have a better sense of the overall system as a coherent whole.

    As a materialist, I reject the intricate cosmologies from all of the world’s great religions. However, raw materialism is thin gruel as a life philosophy – the 20th century created some terrible cults after rejecting the old ones. At least the great religions have stood the test of time, so a seeker might be well served by following one of those schools of thought.

    I’m not endorsing it, but if Indian polytheism floats your boat, this course seems like a reasonable start for such a journey.

    After writing the initial draft, I read a few translations of the Bhagavad Gita, which is an epic poem – in both the classic and modern sense of the term. Highly recommended.

    Everyone should read the Gita.

    But for the year after that, I never got around to reading the Vedas and Upanishads. One day, I’d love to dig into these texts as well, but I have too many other books in my backlog.