Entries from June 2010 ↓

Except for the gunk on the scanner and the CIA black highlighter, that above is what my business card looks like, as of today anyway. I’m no expert on business card design strategy, though I bet the Net has plenty of self-help articles besides this one(!) that’ll tell you all about it and all about what I’ve done “wrong.” The only research I did was to lift one of each business card on display at the Fuzzy’s Taco Shop down the street; then I looked at those cards, figured out what I liked, what I didn’t. I arrived at a few points of wisdom that work for me, and now I’ll broadcast them as if they were absolute truths:

• You should be able to write on the back side of the card (people will want to jot down notes to jog their memories of receiving it); and, if you want to get the front side laminated, make it a thin lamination so the card doesn’t feel imposingly unusual or outlandish. (Mine isn’t laminated on either side.)
• Keep It Simple, Stupid. Looking at the card, I want to discern immediately what’s up. This is because I process billions of business cards per day, obviously.
• Why should I strain to read your card? Increase font size!
• Keep it mostly white to avoid appearing cutesy. Unless being ephemeral is your thing, I guess.
• Be traditional and fairly formal so that your card can be used in a wide variety of circumstances: flexible. However, put a charming thing or two on it — such as a tagline — so that you don’t seem impersonal. Because of the Net, I think freelance biz depends on a personal touch even more than before.

I had 200 cards made at Staples down the other side of the street for just under $40, if I recall correctly. Easier to have a small quantity now (since people do ask me for them) and figure out the hypothetical perfect design later. For designing Staples set me at a touchscreen computer that was easy enough, and you can bring a JPG there if you want for a logo.

The best business card I saw at Fuzzy’s, by the way, was a woman advertising her services as an Experimental Physicist. As opposed to a Theoretical Physicist, of course.

P.S., as an editor I can fix up your AD/PR or flier or whatnot, and as a tutor I teach Latin, humanities courses (depending), and study skills.

via Phillie Casablanca

Several times during Kate and I’s wedding & honeymoon trip, I asked taxicab drivers in NYC and DC for marriage advice — partly because, like Perot & Obama both, I’m all ears for suggestions; also, partly for the sake of amateur anthropology and since I simply like talking with people. The more unusual the person, the better. The more you feel you understand things well, the more you have to cultivate the attitude that other people might actually outsmart you; and, strangers are often the ones who give you best insights.

However, I don’t think I’ll be taking this one taxicab driver’s advice, which he gave as I stepped out of his cab: that Kate and I need to have children immediately. I replied that we were considering maybe one or two children sometime about five to seven years from now, and he hollered that Kate and I need to output one within a year. It focuses things, he shouted, driving off.

When I rode from St. Mark’s Bookshop (I purchased the rest of Paul Park‘s Roumania Quartet, but wisely left Jung‘s awesome and awesomely expensive Red Book to peruse at local libraries; also, St. Mark’s had a great poster that graphed USA economic inequality — this too I refrained from purchasing, partly because such a purchase seemed ironic splurging) — when I rode from St. Mark’s Bookstore toward Cafe Lalo, where Kate was waiting, a Senegalese taxicab driver poured all sorts of advice into the backseat. “Put water in your mouth!” he advised. “If you are angry, if you are about to speak hastily, put water in your mouth instead! Hold the water in your mouth until it cools your anger!”

Citing the numinous wifely wisdom that causes husbands to tremble, he also said Kate was always right about everything. On this I respectfully disagree. =)

But I do agree with his misleadingly callous-sounding comment that spouses shouldn’t have too high expectations of one another. Because no spouse can fulfill every need for the other; if one spouse isn’t into, say, heavy metal or shoes, the other can share that passion with his or her own friends instead. Plus, if the one spouse does check out a metal band or scrutinize some shoes, it’s a bonus for the other, not the fulfillment of some needy requirement the other has. And that way, with a good marriage, each constantly receives bonuses instead of feeling disappointment at failures to meet unreasonable expectations.

In DC (where we honeymooned) the taxicab drivers were tenser, less prone to talk, and busy listening to political news. The diverse taxicab experiences in both places, however, made me hope even more to be able to approach the world someday such that I genuinely feel that everyone, even the most problematic (mean-spirited, or obnoxious, or …) person has something to teach me.

Gratuitous Wedding Pic, by Katje Hempel

Clarion West, the six-week writer’s workshop I attended in 2008 on a space station in geosynchronous orbit above Seattle, hosts an online donation drive called the Write-a-thon each summer concurrent with the in-person workshop (June 20 – July 30). This year I’m participating in the drive along with many other former students and instructors. Here’s the deal: participating writers pledge to complete a certain amount of work individually; their friends, family, and fans donate whatever amount they choose to Clarion West as a show of support for both the writers and the organization. My goal: “Each of the six weeks I’ll either write a complete, good first draft of a new short story, or finish revising an older, in-progress one.”

I describe my feelings for Clarion West and my background in terms of the Write-a-thon further on my personal Write-a-thon profile page.

The donation drive works on an honor system — but, if you want proof I actually meet my Write-a-thon goals, I’m happy to accommodate you privately pretty much however you see fit. And, no promises, but if you do donate and want a character named after you in one of the stories, let me know that, too, as long as your name isn’t Forrest Gump or Darth Vader; if your name is euphonious I’ll ask the Muse to see if It can work anything out.

Clarion West is a nonprofit organization, and in the United States donations there are tax-deductible, as described on the main Write-a-thon webpage. Remember the organization has to fly the space station, pay the instructors, and so on — a lot goes into making this wonderful workshop happen. Rest assured that it is totally, totally, totally acceptable to donate a mere $5 if you want; $5 times a lot of donors times a lot of writers equals a whole lot of money.

To donate, you can either 1) click the PayPal “Donate” button on my personal Write-a-thon profile page, or 2) send with a note mentioning my name a snail-mail check to:

Clarion West
P.O. Box 31264
Seattle, WA 98103-1264

Thanks everyone, and I really appreciate even a single $5 donation to Clarion West. Let me know if you donate: it’ll make me work harder! Feel free to badger me about my progress towards my Write-a-thon goals, too!

Yesterday (18 June 2010) my friend and I attended the final concert of Guitar Fort Worth‘s sixth season. Texas Wesleyan University hosted the event at Martin Hall as part of their Wesleyan Masters Concert Series. The three classical guitarists pictured above gave the audience a wonderful evening. Will Douglas is on his way to study with Eliot Fisk at The New England Conservatory of Music; Michael Dailey, who started playing at age five and has taken lessons from players such as Andres Ségovia and Pepe Romero, remains impressive as head of household for much Fort Worth classical guitar; Emma Rush, founder and director of the Guitar Hamilton concert series and a top graduate of Hochschule für Musik in Detmold Germany, soon heads for concerts in Canada, Turkey, Mexico, and elsewhere.

Listening, I kept imagining the guitarists as making for us in the audience conversations with their guitars, and I was pleasantly surprised at how closely their personalities and their playing seemed to match. Will Douglas struck me as a fun guy whose performance resembled kind, pleasant talk — especially I’m thinking of the piece he played by Johann Kaspar Mertz, “Lied Ohne Worte”; Michael Dailey gave small benevolent smiles at the conclusion of each piece he played, all of which sounded effortlessly articulate, fluent, and well-spoken, filled with the neat nuances artful speakers include when they converse; and, Emma Rush brought an enigmatic, mysterious, almost secretive touch to her playing that became most exciting when she dazzled us with Jose Luis Merlin‘s “Suite Del Recuerdo.” I’d enjoy hearing any of these three perform again. When it came to a close, I realized the concert had made my world seem to brightly open more widely than before.

My Clarion West 2008 classmate Rajan Khanna snapped the above photograph of Kate and I at NYC’s bar dba (the 41 First Avenue location) on Thursday May 27th 2010, two days before she and I’s wedding. The bar was great — examples of its background music, so unlike Fort Worth playlists, are sufficient proof of that for me: “Would?” by Alice in Chains, “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction, “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” by The Ramones — and seeing long-time friends there (Theresa! Janna!) made me exuberant. Especially when Raj said: “Douglas, you’re all grown up now.” Raj, thanks!

Check out my T-shirt, by the way. This will be old news to many, but the hexadecimal number printed on it, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 (which in regular decimal notation is 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640 — thirteen undecillion something), can be used in various ways — for example, as a tongue twister, as a song lyric, or as a key to break HD-DVD and Blu-ray copy protection. In 2007, in response to the number becoming publicly known, the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator LLC (a trade organization providing encryption technology and backed by Disney, Microsoft, and others) sent sites such as Digg.com take-down demand letters that claimed their publication of or trafficking in the number constituted violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and asked for the webpages to be removed, as though webpages aren’t constantly cached and archived elsewhere anyway. (Clay Shirky discusses Digg’s counter-response in his interesting book Here Comes Everybody — the book’s title, I’ll pedantically note, comes from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.) The legal threats cued the Streisand effect, wherein efforts to silence something controversial only cause it to be repeated more loudly: everyday netizens republished the number an undecillion times over, including on a certain black EDUN LIVE Essential T-shirt worn by me, courtesy of zazzle.com. Although it’s feasible to legally threaten a small number of people (such as those running Digg.com), it’s impossible to legally threaten a vast number of people (such as each and every podunk blogger posting about 09 F9); this basic principle of mass civil disobedience, used by the pro-piracy netizens, now prevents — I presume — additional take-down demand letters from being sent, as in, for example, to me. The world has been made safe for long strings of alphanumerics.

My interest in the number have far more to do with legal philosophy than me pirating anything, just so you know. Since I can’t say anything useful about copyright and copyleft at the moment, however, I’ll just post some links to sites that do say interesting
things about them; I don’t necessarily agree with their views, of course. Here: the Electronic Frontier Foundation on 09 F9, an Abjectivist advocating strict intellectual property laws, and Cory Doctorow’s nonfiction collection Content.

Kate and I married in NYC on Saturday 29 May 2010 at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Six guests attended: our four parents, her sister, and my best friend. Supporting personnel included LDF Floral and Event Design, the estimable Eileen Regan as officiant, and the very effective Katje Hempel as photographer; all three worked perfectly. (The photograph above is Katje’s, as is the pair below. You can see a few more photographs on Katje’s blog.)

Our short service included a reading from (and this was Kate’s idea!) Theodore Sturgeon’s novel Godbody:

This is the answer!
The answer is not in getting and keeping, but in getting and giving.
The answer is not in saving and preserving, but in growing and changing.
The answer is not in making things stop, but in making things go.
The answer is not in thinking, but in feeling.
The answer is not death, but love.

Kate and I stayed at the On the Ave hotel in NYC between Wednesday 26 May and Monday 31 May; we honeymooned in DC from Monday 31 May to Sunday 6 June, staying at The Jefferson hotel, an amazingly nice place. In DC, among other sites, we really enjoyed visiting the Smithsonian American History Museum (Julia Child’s kitchen!) and the Lincoln Memorial at night. In both cities, we shared some fantastic meals.

Soon I’ll post more about our adventures … and the loquacious taxicab drivers’ marriage advice.