I was curious about my lot in life, Of course the Wall Street Journal had an answer.
I started with my current wage. Top 6%. Nice!
Added demographic information. “Male, Asian, Gen X, with an Advanced Degree” Down to 44%!
Barely above the median! Last year, I joined a Slack channel with Berkeley alums. It was obvious that I was the lowest earning member.
What to make of it?
Well, I’m damn lucky. Even as the underachiever among my peers, I’m doing better than fine. A sign that I was born halfway between third base and home plate.
When I compare myself against the guys on Slack, I remind myself of the people building my projects, Trading their bodies for an hourly wage. I was there too, moving dirt in the Oakland hills, But just a short-timer before grabbing a desk job.
I’m blessed with a good career, with meaningful work that I enjoy. A gig that leaves time to hang out with the kids. Earning enough, we don’t worry about money.
Why am I comparing myself against others? #Enough is #Winning, everything else is #Vanity.
Given our fears of the incoming pandemic, I skipped his wake, though I left some offerings outside his studio before the world shut down.
I met Alex in his studio during a First Friday art walk soon after moving to Vegas ten years ago. He was working on a series of collages with old black and white magazine images on a black scratchboard background.
As an architect, I was struck with the sparseness of the series with its urban perspectives. I lent him an exhibition monograph of black and white collages by Romare Bearden.
Over the years, I’d deliver old architectural sets to his studio. I was excited to see his work exhibited at the library — some of my drawings had been incorporated into his collages! We enjoyed the occasional chat, where I learned that he used to valet cars at a casino, but taught himself how to paint, rescuing himself from alcoholism with the brush.
These chats didn’t happen nearly enough, because of the arrivals of my daughter and then her brother. One day, I planned on introducing him to my kids, when they were old enough to understand what it meant, “Here’s a real artist!”
Then again, the kids see him every day, in two small paintings I picked up from our time together. The best money I’ve spent in Vegas.
February 2020 was a long month, processing the loss and watching the pandemic inexorably work its way towards our shores.
During that time, I listened to this song on repeat. I was lucky to find something that meshed perfectly with my emotional turmoil.
In America, Joe Hisaishi is known for his collaborations with Studio Ghibli, but this song isn’t from one of those films. Maybe that’s why it touched my soul. I could imprint this music with my own memories.
Even though those personal and global tragedies came in winter, I always think of this song when it gets hot.
The air conditioning kicked on for the first time yesterday.
Welcome to “Summer”.
I never reclaimed that book, I should replace my old copy.
I spent my undergrad focused on the arts, not theory, much less jumping into the insanity of A Thousand Plateaus, by Deleuze and Guttari.
The studio was about the nomad. I picked the Truck Stop as my program and the site was the 16th Street Train Station, at the time completely abandoned.
Unlike the aborigines’ in Bruce Chatwin’s Song Lines, I stayed completely lost the entire semester.
I made a video of rubber ducks. I visited a port terminal at the Port of Oakland (before 9/11 you could just drive up and ask for a tour). I spelunked that Train Station multiple times. I drove inland to check out real truck stops. I mashed ramen onto a wood board (that didn’t go well).
One night, my buddy threw a pack of cigarettes on a desk and we spent hours hashing out a grand scheme that looked promising.
The next morning I reviewed it with my professor. She agreed it was a good start.
I pulled out my drop papers. She happily signed it to avoid failing me.
That was my last day of class at UC Berkeley.
The main takeaway from the studio was to trust myself.
Raveevarn Choksombatchai was a brilliant professor who would ask pointed questions every time I met her. As a young designer, I earnestly took in every critique.
Her pedagogical approach was to be the devil’s advocate. She stress tested my convictions. That would be a fun studio nowadays, but I wasn’t ready.
Her challenges convinced me to reassess everything every time. Starting over twice a week is a great way to get nowhere.
I’ve since realized that the grand concept is only the seed of a project. Part of the designer’s job is to say “fuck it, good enough, move on”.
There are plenty of problems at that next scale. Architecture is more than a conceptual art; it’s also a craft. Design challenges will confront you at every level along the way.
Don’t let (yourself or someone else) stop you at gestalt.
I’ve gone in quite a different direction from those high concept Berkeley days. Indeed, I don’t design. In the past five years, I’ve done four sketches, my last one locating one door in a short corridor.
But the lesson of this failed studio still lingers.
Not a painful barb, but a gentle reminder to trust myself.
My ideas aren’t perfect, but I know they’re good enough for taking that next step — cause analysis paralysis is so much worse.
I don’t think you can ask for a more impactful lesson coming out of college.
While reading the Bodhicaryavatara, I was struck at its resonance with Christianity.
It has an intense focus on good and bad (defilement), a clear conception of hell, a strident moral directive evangelize (alleviate suffering), and even included a chapter of detailed logical argumentation to prove the another world is more real than our physical world.
I did not expect this Buddhist text to rhyme so closely to my experience as a reformed Baptist high schooler — there even multiple passages that even vilifies sexual desire!
Over the past few years, I had focused on Confucianism and Daoism which feels totally foreign from Christianity. I assumed Buddhism would be similarly alien from the religion of my childhood. It wasn’t.
I needed a quick primer on Buddhism to reset my expectations, and this short essay by Robert Eno delivered. It covered a lot of ground in a quick read and I enjoyed Eno’s slightly irreverent tone. Clearly, he has taught this material many times to sleep deprived college students.
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To wildly speculate on parallels with Christianity, Buddhism came as a reform religion, stripping away calcified rituals, with an focus on (avoiding) the next life, and had an egalitarian imperative that energized it to spread across the continent.
In contrast, Confucianism and Daoism were uninterested in the question of salvation. These were elite philosophies that were wrestling with how to craft a state (or withdraw from the brutality of court politics) in the throes of a dying empire.
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As a pantheistic atheist, I often worry about the old warning “if you believe in nothing you’ll believe in anything”. Hopefully I don’t fall into that trap, but I also can’t shake the intuition that billions of people can’t be all wrong. At the very least, there must something that has made these teachings worth transmitting to the next generation again and again over the millennia.
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I never skip a chance to plug Robert Eno’s great chinatxt website. Go check it out.
I started a Great Courses lecture series by Malcom David Eckel, I’m enjoying it so far (two hours into the twelve hour course).
My wife and her parents speak dialect at home. It can be off-putting to be left out at the dinner table, but I speak English with my wife, so it evens out.
I occasionally mention that she should teach the kids Hangzhou Hua, but I know that it will never happen. My sister and I also started in Chinese but migrated to English after hitting elementary school.
The other day, we tested them on the dialect. Like my halting mandarin, they have a functional knowledge of their mother’s tongue without speaking it.
Amidst the lunchtime banter, the decades collapsed into a flicker. One day, this unique set of vocalizations will disappear from the aural background of our home.
Unless we move to Hangzhou, my wife’s dialect will follow her parents. Her childhood will go mute. Like other indigenous languages, it will disappear slowly then suddenly.
Another casualty of mass culture, one more accommodation in an immigrant’s story.
I’ve always thought I’d read some Chinese philosophy, someday.
That day came on a sunny afternoon my mind was blown as I was parking my car behind E-Jo, a Korean bone broth restaurant. The History of China podcast was talking about a Han dynasty emperor who used Daoism as his ruling ideology.
That blew my mind. I always thought Daoists were crazy drunks in a forest, not competing with Confucians in the halls of power.
Don’t get me wrong, the Tao Te Ching is great stuff for skipping out into the woods. But there is plenty of “leadership advice”. Timely stuff before landing a gig as a Project Manager representing the State.
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True leaders are hardly known to their followers. . . . When the work’s done right, with no fuss or boasting, ordinary people say, Oh, we did it.
excerpt from Tao Te Ching 17
My project teams have been complimentary of my leadership. Of course, I’m the source of their next project, so it’s hard to know how much of it is sincere. Then again, I guess such compliments are better than the alternative. On my end, I believe that I have the easiest job on the team. I move some paper around and they do all the real work.
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And so the wise soul predominates without dominating, and leads without misleading. And people don’t get tired of enjoying and praising one who, not competing, has in all the world no competitor.
excerpt from Tao Te Ching 66
A hidden benefit of joining the State is that any promotion includes a significant increase in stress for a marginal pay raise. There is no financial incentive to rise up the hierarchy. As such, I have no competition in my office. If someone else wants the headache, let them have it.
John Minford’s commentary for this section includes this short poem by Li Bo for his friend the Taoist Hermit Yuan Danqiu.
I envy you, my friend, Dwelling on East Mountain, Lover of beauteous hills and valleys, Asleep in the green season of spring Among empty forests, Rising long after daybreak, The wind in the pines Blowing through your sleeves, The stony brook washing your soul. I envy you, Lying there unperturbed, Pillowed high On your emerald mist.
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How to make peace? Wise souls keep their part of the contract and don’t make demands on others. People whose power is real fulfill their obligations; people whose power is hollow insist on their claims.
excerpt from Tao Te Ching 79
In the heat of the moment, it’s easy to get annoyed at an underperforming contractor or consultant. Such tendencies get worse the longer I hold this comfortable position of power. I need to constantly remind myself that I don’t have to insist on my rights — I hold the fucking checkbook. Unfortunately, I’m sometimes forced to remind my partners of their obligations and my expectations of their performance, but there’s no excuse for losing my cool.
Whosoever lacks Inner Power will try to control Others by Force, will demand a due, exact a tithe, and Bitterness will ensue. The Tao of Softness and gentleness wards off Bitterness. Hardness and Strength, Vanity and Pride create Bitterness and Resentment
John Minford’s translation of Magister Liu’s commentary
I’m only a third through The Box, but I can already recommend it.
A good history book creates context and energizes the mind. As we wrestle with the advent of AI, Levinson tells a a story of disruption that rhymes with what I fear we will see in the coming years.
The world of shipping was completely different up through the first half of the 20th century before the invention and adoption of containers. Then the 50’s and 60’s flipped it upside down.
It’s mindblowing that we had a world of international trade with individually packed ships. How did we supply two world wars on opposite oceans merely with muscling things in and out holds?
What American doesn’t feel some sense of pride at a crazy innovator- entrepreneur stumbling into the creation of a new system to revolutionize the world?
The next chapter tells the utter devastation that this change wrought upon New York City. But was it ultimately for the better?
And chapter 6 details the struggles of the Longshoremen unions grappling with this change. (Good luck to us white collars, without any union support!)
I’m curious what the next chapters will bring. It’s already been well worth the time. So surprising that the boring shipping container is the center of such a riveting narrative!
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Here’s a gratuitous plug for the boardgame Container by Franz-Benno Delonge. It’s one of my favorite games — a basic ruleset for a brainbursting experience. It’s been out of print for a while but can be easily DIY’ed.