Saveur’s Paella was an amazing way to celebrate Dad’s birthday. Garth and I did all the prep about an hour before Mom, Dad, and Beth got home from the airport. The recipe itself was stellar – the flavors are amazing, and the cooking is easy. Garth suggested infusing the oil with the spices from the beginning – the result was amazing. Two things I would do differently: the Paella pan was great but needed to be a couple of inches deeper, and we increased the recipe by about a third – next time I’d decrease it by the same amount because we had waaaaaay too much food!

Homecomings are a funny thing, full of the deeply familiar and flavored with shocks of change.

My room – an old haven, but now under someone else’s art direction. My belongings (my home?) are in another state. This is just a room to sleep in. And make a mess of, because life out of a suitcase means belongings scattered across the room.

The return is chock-full of encounters with things I hadn’t thought about, and am now finding myself sharply, retroactively, missing. I miss not having missed them. I miss that I didn’t think about them, and they are everyday steps here. The insignificant things that become big parts of your day when you do them every single day for three years, but when absent are truly gone – and not remembered.

First full day home, and a mid-morning drive to Pica brought the thought that I hadn’t thought about how to get there in a year. The streets in the midcoast area easy, the route almost a straight shot but I hadn’t considered it even once in the last year. And perhaps more surprising than that was the realizing that I could still drive it on autopilot, my hands making the turns faster than my brain could recall. Muscle memory is so comforting in daily processes, but absolutely startling when it takes over in what are now uncommon activities.

Small things laced with surprise: knowing the faces of every checkout clerk at the Co-op; Chase’s serving the same tomato-gruyere tarts as always; chocolate-chunk cherry cookies that taste exactly the same; automatically veering around the (still there) pothole that shakes my (very little) car on the road home; the comfort of being right back in a creative concept development meeting, discussing ideas and debating merits. The feeling of being around these amazing, creative, brilliant people sinks into my heart – muscle memory of a different kind.

I love this place. It’s not home. It probably won’t be again. But I love it all the same.

I fell in love with her work on Etsy, without knowing a single thing about her. I saw the porcupine first. I’ve been tracking her website and her personal (animal) work for over two years at this point, and catching this piece on Etsy definitely made my night.

I’ve never been much of a ‘girly girl’. I didn’t play dress up when I was little, or practice walking in heels. I didn’t touch nail polish or makeup until well into high school (and even then barely). I didn’t spend hours learning to curl my hair, or braid it, or any of the other tricks that I now really wish I knew. I did go as a princess for Halloween once – and I was especially excited that I found a sword to carry. In my fairy tales, princesses get to be armed too!

All of those things are skills, and practicing when you’re a kid makes them second nature later on. I missed out on that, and I’ve been aware especially aware of it recently because I live with Emilie and Angelina who are both amazing at such things (well, they practiced!). So last night, as Emilie went to curl her hair before going out, I said that at some point, I needed to get someone to teach me how to do that. She said to come on down and watch, so I grabbed my camera (and our respective glasses of wine), and did exactly that.

Emilie started the process, and I began to photograph. Emilie’s pretty used to me photographing her, but I haven’t been shooting in a while, so it took both of us a while to get back into the pattern of ignoring-but-paying-attention that produces the best images. At one point, clips sectioning out her hair, curler in action, arms up above her head trying to manage it all, she saw the camera, became aware of her position, and said, “You are lucky I trust you this much.”

And I thought – yeah, yeah I am. I am so incredibly lucky you trust me this much, and that is exactly the kind of relationship I want with the people I photograph. I want them to always know that it’s important to me that they like the photographs I create of them. Photographs are my way of sharing with people what I see, and what I love, in them. Her trusting me, her knowing that I will create and share images that she will be pleased with – that’s such an honor, and something I never want to lose sight of. Building those relationships is something I work at, something I practice, and I literally get chills when product is something other people find value in. So it may take a little longer to figure out how to curl my hair, but I did grow up practicing something–and I’m awfully glad I did.

“In living more simply, we encounter life more directly. We need little when we are directly in touch with life. It is when we remove ourselves from direct and wholehearted participation in life that emptiness and boredom creep in. It is then that we begin our search for something or someone that will fill our gnawing dissatisfaction.”

– Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity

I want to directly and wholeheartedly participate in life.

A recent exchange in class:

U1: At my last job we would work with a specialist company for the duration of one job, long enough for our programmers to figure out what they were doing and how, and then when the next job like that came up our programmers would be able to do it on their own.

U2: That makes sense, but it only works for so long. You can’t expect people to be able to infinitely acquire new languages and skillsets.

U1: But…they’re programmers…

Programmers do need to be able to acquire new skills. Heck, with the recent estimation that we all will change career fields 3-5 times in our life, let’s hope we all keep on our toes in regards to picking up new knowledge and skills. But the idea that as part of your job you would be expected to constantly add new fluencies in languages (and these *are* languages, don’t let the technical aspect disguise that) that you’ve never studied, merely by paying attention to the practices of an expert over the course of a single task (where their focus is not on educating you, but doing their job)… I don’t think it’s a sustainable practice. I don’t think it’s a healthy expectation in a job role. I think programmers should be heavily encouraged to constantly stay abreast of new tech and languages, and aided in the pursuit of education — perhaps most importantly with the affordance of time away from a strict job list to tinker and build in a new language — in new material. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that simply throwing them into the company of expert after expert for brief periods of time will allow for anything but the most cursory of understandings of the material, and in the process you’re under-appreciating the actual experts and over-taxing your own people.

My favorite photo from the weekend:

Perhaps the point is that e-Harmony could work for any set of people, but the contrast between the page and the ad made me laugh.