coming back from kairos at 2 am

now that mary has been spreading the gospel, i feel very very bad about not having posted much since school started. a combination of school kicking my ass and my computer monitor being (a) tv static or (b) distorted in the x-axis has dissuaded me from looking at pretty things on the internet as well.

here's a nice line from papercuts today:

When my wife and I got married, we combined our book collections and made a deal. It’s the kind of brutal arrangement that pretty much guarantees we’re sticking it out until the end. Here’s how it works: If she ever leaves me, I get to keep all her books. If I ever leave her, she gets mine. Loser take all. More things in life ought to work that way.

and for no reason at all than that paragraph from mr. dwight garner, a few life ambitions: 1. tree house. 2wedding registry at phaidon to accumulate all expensive design books that i want. 3. octagonal-shaped library (in which to house all my happy books).

i've been taking a seminar that bill burnett is calling "voice lessons." it's a predicatably "bill" class, i suppose, one to teach us how to maneuver around the world as ambiguously-degreed PD people and how to "find our voice." how to be smart about it, how to articulate it, and figuring out what "it" is exactly and what "it" is that you want. it's the class i look forward to the most-- for the people, for the break from the present, for the self-reflection... we watched a clip of the film version of the fountainhead today and also did some elevator pitches, which got me to thinking about tall buildings.

with this seminar in addition to a negotiation class i'm taking this quarter, i feel like everything is starting to get directed "up." going up elevators is more than just 30 second pitches... it seems to be a lot more about some literary motif... elevating life in a wholly practical way that is a little depressing, a little resigned. most definitely mundane. but today, standing in an "elevator" created by pushing some chairs around, it felt positively terrifying-- and without even leaving the ground.

i remember having written in people's high school yearbooks about being at the unsteady cusp of something in our lives. some sort of precarious place that's either at the top of a peak in a thrilling way, or maybe in an intimidating way. well, that was all bullshit back then. i'm really feeling it now. today in the seminar, we jotted down some thoughts on "workview" (that's it, just the word and what it feels like in your head). i decided to type it up here. (indulge me.)

I'm realizing that work is increasingly about setting out to do something. And only after that, it's attending to the details. Details can drag you down and details are most often about people. Details carry everything else out; so it seems that ideas are in setting out and details are the means of execution. Those details form the "task."

But something I didn't expect was "setting out" being work; getting started and even starting over-- it's the ideas that get you out of the details...

Work, versus school, is to become a specialist. I think that work means becoming the person who is responsible for something, someone the others turn to for x. It's training yourself for longer attention spans and more and more reliance on others. It's hurrying and waiting, because you're part of something bigger-- and only sometimes more empowering-- than yourself.

So i wrote that down in class, but i think what i hit on was the insight that what i most fear is the stopping of growth. i never want to stop being a generalist. i never want to have become an authority on something. but it seems like the elevators are only going up sometimes, not in or out or slightly bearing left.

have you seen hotel chevalier yet? i wish an elevator could take me to live in a wes anderson movie.