drawing connections between things & lines on maps
Jan 18, 2024
When I was 5 years old my mom was driving me to school on probably a Monday morning in her gold dodge minivan. I was wearing a colorful striped sweater and pink pants– a new outfit she’d gotten for me that weekend from JCPenney. We got a green light to cross 95th Street on Lamar Avenue and, about three-quarters of the way to the other side, were struck by what I understood to be a cargo van. I learned later that the cargo van was actually a semi-truck.
Sep 1, 2023
When I was a kid I was inundated with advice on how to be a person. I heard it in church, in school, in books. I was lost as a kid, maybe in a way that all kids are, or maybe just kids in difficult situations.
Oct 22, 2022
I’ve been in a bit of a creative desert recently (maybe I need to eat more creative desserts). I don’t form connections between disparate things in the same way that I used to, likely in part because I am growing as a person!?
Jul 26, 2021
The road in front of me is lit dimly by my low beams as the suburban highway mercropolis fades in my rear-view mirror. I pass a tower reminiscent of Stanford’s, but this one marks the headquarters of a new-agey religious group; its campus is a popular place to take photos before high school dances. Soon my surroundings darken; it hits me I’m on the route to Kauffman Stadium, where the Royals play. I think about how it feels to drive on paths that connect places I’ve only ever been driven to, the way disjoint nodes become tightly coupled in the...
Oct 26, 2020
I woke up early and scrambled out of my tent to get on the road for the century day of the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa. It was misty and the sun was barely rising as I clipped my shoes into my pedals and stretched my legs with each downward push, still sore from the ride the day before. I wanted to get on the road early knowing I had 100+ miles ahead of me.
May 11, 2020
This summer I spent a week in Florence for a conference presenting a paper I wrote with my mentors at the Allen Institute for AI. Not long before, I’d been travelling around Europe with a friend and had returned to the midwest for a little over a week to do RAGBRAI with two of my best buddies and to see Jerry Seinfeld with my grandma and mom.
Apr 26, 2020
When I lived in Seattle I’d go for runs around Lake Union, sometimes from my house in the University District all the way to the Space Needle, but always at least across the Fremont Bridge… “Center of the Universe”. I loved to run when it was dark out, sometimes after work or school, others at around 10 PM, when I could avoid other runners.
Jan 2, 2020
I saw Parasite recently and walked away thinking about similar themes to those widely written about (class, mostly), but also about one scene that brought me to tears.
Jan 1, 2020
I was home for Christmas and feeling a little melancholic thinking about my family getting older and time passing. While watching Elf with my mom and grandma I perused some domain names (as one does :). I recently lost olgapark dot com, a domain name I got for free through a scholarship program I was in during college. It was supposed to be for a personal/professional site but I already had one so I made a site for me and Olga’s park.