Person of the Day: Derek

Freshman year, 1992.

About a month ago, I reconnected with a friend from college, whom I have not spoken to in many years. Which is so odd, because in college, Derek was one of my best and dearest friends. He wrote me long aerograms full of Carnegie Mellon life, while I was in Ghana. In fact, I think he wrote to me even more than my mother did.

And so despite not having been in touch, other than the odd holiday card every so often over the years, when we finally spoke again recently, it was like we had never not been out of touch. In fact, it was really lovely, actually.

Derek phrased it best, when he wrote to me: "It's both amazing and refreshing that despite how much time has passed, it feels like almost none at all."

Midtown Zen

Tonight, I had to work late…so Kenny met me in the city and we went to Aburiya Kinnosuke for dinner, rather spontaneously. This is one of my most favorite Japanese restaurants in the city, and eating dinner there always makes me supremely cheerful. It might be because of the velvety cold tofu in the bamboo basket with three different types of flavored salt. Or perhaps its the hanging shrub shaped like a ball, in the entry way.

Play!

I love this mural in NoLita, on Spring Street.

Paper shopping bags

Finally! Whole Foods made the switch over to paper shopping bags on Earth Day this year. Apparently, they tried to switch over previously, but so many customers complained about the loss of the plastic bags, that they pathetically switched back to plastic. But like a real "green company," they finally decided this year that the idea of plastic bags at Whole Foods was pretty oxymoronic, and they finally switched back to paper, for good. Those petroleum product abusers who MUST have plastic bags can always go grocery shopping at Pathmark.

Buildings shaped like corn

photo by wally g

photo by corsi photo

On the way to the airport, I spotted this amazing! apartment complex called Marina City, which was designed to pay symbolic tribute to the Midwest's farming economy — the towers look like giant corncobs. It contains two circular apartment towers, with a circular parking garage occupying the bottom 19 floors of each building — which form an exposed spiral parking ramp with 896 parking spaces per building! They buildings were built on the Chicago River between 1959-1964 by architect Bertrand Goldberg. If I ever had the desire to live in Chicago, I would definitely want to live here.

Rock-n-Roll McDonald's

photo by Slurpee

photos by Paxton Holley

Today as I took a cab from O'Hare Airport to my hotel, I passed the coolest McDonald's I have ever seen — Chicago's very famous Rock-n-Roll McDonald's, on Clark Street. Not that I have ever heard of it, but that does not mean much, since I honestly don't frequent many McDonalds's. But for some reason, I love to photograph them whenever I travel. Apparently, this particular McDonald's even has Le Corbu Petit Comfort Chairs chairs and a Nelson Marshmallow Sofa on the second floor AND its the first location to ever have a two lane drive through…however, the giant golden arches are the best part. You can see them from blocks away.

I heart ส้มตำ

I have been currently obsessed with Som Tam, which is a spicy green papaya salad. The first time I ever had this salad was when I was in the Isan part of Thailand, where it is traditionally eaten with barbecued chicken and sticky rice. In addition to unripe papaya, the salad contains yardlong beans, sugar, peanuts, fermented fish sauce, chile, garlic and lime — and it is all pounded together in a mortar until its completely mashed up.

In Thailand, there are women everywhere making this salad on the side of the road, and you can buy it in a small, skinny plastic bag — which is not super appetizing. However, it never stopped me from literally eating it straight from the bag. And as it is usually VERY spicy (which is the norm in Thailand), many times my lips would actually go numb.

So, I have eaten this salad every day for lunch for the last week. I am trying not to eat any animals, dairy or grains for a few weeks, which leaves me like nothing at all to eat. Except for peanut M&Ms, and Som Tam. Despite eating it for the past five days, without fail, this dish never disappoints. There is most perfect balance of crunch to softness, salty to sweet, and spiciness. If you want to make it at home, here is a recipe.

K-Y® Jelly song

KY Jelly ad from Big Tree Productions on Vimeo.

A colleague at work sent this video to me…it was created by one of the actors in the recent K-Y® Yours + Mine commercials that were shot recently. I love that the guy was so loving K-Y®, that he wrote a song about it. And filmed it.

Happy Earth Day!

According to Flags of the World, the Ecology Flag was created by cartoonist Ron Cobb, and was published for the first time in October 25, 1969. The flag was patterned after the flag of the United States, and had thirteen stripes alternating green and white. Its canton was green with a yellow Theta. It originally had a symbol that was a combination of the letters "E" and "O" taken from the words "Environment" and "Organism", respectively. Later flags used either a Theta because of its historic use as a warning symbol, or the Peace Symbol. Theta would later become associated with Earth Day.

¡Estoy aprendiendo hablar Español!

Today, I spontaneously signed up for Spanish lessons, which began this evening. So for the next nine weeks, I will be in a three hour long Spanish class. I am very excited because the languages of the future are Spanish and Mandarin, and I am actually going to make learning both of these languages part of my overall personal development goals for 2008, at work.

Yellow Flowers

I am a sucker for yellow flowers…they are my favorite flower color, with a particular fondness in my heart for daffodils. Maybe because daffodils mean that spring should be coming soon. This year, I missed daffodil season somehow. Maybe, because spring still is not here? The blooms throughout the city caught my eye briefly whenever I rushed past on my way to somewhere not super important, and I never managed to take any pictures of New York's daffodils this season. So I have to content myself with yellow tulips. Which also have a cheerful and perky appearance, that is until they bloom fully, and then I sadly find tulips to be sort of like gawky adolescents wearing too much eyeliner.

Ananlogous colored outfits

The top half.

The bottom half.

I heart פֶּסַח

my whole wheat matzoh ball soup

Doug's coconut-apricot macaroons

Kenny's beef brisket

the seder table, minus the noodle-less kugel which was still in the oven

Yesterday morning I woke up feeling sad, knowing that this would be the first time in 12 years that I will have not celebrated my most favorite holiday of the whole year — Passover — with the Prinskys and the Adlers (see my post about Passover from last year, here). (Really quickly: Passover commemorates the Exodus from Egypt and the liberation of the Israelites from slavery. The term "passover" refers to God's sparing of the Hebrew firstborn as he saw the blood of the Passover lamb on the door posts of their houses on the night of the Tenth Plague.)

Since moving to New York City, I have always celebrated the Jewish holidays with my Brooklyn-adopted family, the Prinskys. However, this year, Bob and Carlo were in the south of France, and I am not sure the Adlers were up for celebrating Passover…so we were left to figure out on our own, how to celebrate Pesach. Which is when we asked Kate and Doug to celebrate with us.

First of all, none of the grocery stores in Brooklyn had any haggadahs. Every single haggadah I have ever used for passover — ok, my parents' and the Prinskys — have come from a grocery store. Grocery stores used to give them away for free during passover; a custom which has obviously since died away. This bummed me out greatly, because it meant we would have no idea when to say daiyenu, and we would certainly get all of the 10 plagues mixed up, let alone bungle the four questions (Why is this night different from all other nights? Why tonight do we eat only unleavened bread? Why tonight do we eat bitter herbs? Why tonight do we dip them twice? Why tonight do we all recline?).

Doug looked the four questions up on his iPhone, but forgot to look up the answers, so we all had to wing it. (Thus reminding me of Max Adler, and causing me to miss him inordinately…Max who has read the four questions at the Prinskys' seder for as long as I have been celebrating with them, and for longer, I am certain.)

But somehow we managed to have a really wonderful passover meal despite the sadness of a missing Max, and the informality of the religious traditions. The wonderfulness came from Kate and Doug, and their home made macaroons, a Sephardic charoset made with bananas and pistacioes (which looked very much like morter), and a fabulous noodle kugel made only with matzoh and no noodles, incidentally — which tasted like the most delicious baked French toast you could ever imagine. I made whole wheat matzoh balls, which turned out to be amazingly light and fluffy, if I can say so myself. And Kenny made the pièce de résistance: a slow cooked beef brisket.

Columbia-style salsa dancing

A few weeks ago, my salsa teacher, Walter, told me all about how Columbia (the country) was a HUGE salsa dancing country. I was surprised, as I thought that salsa was only popular in Puerto Rico and Cuba. Apparently, Cali, Columbia is known for its incredible footwork. So I was searching around on You Tube to see some examples of Columbian salsa and stumbled across this video, of children salsa dancing in the Cali-style. This is crazy. Seriously.



and this one too:

Over the top

This spring (I am rushing the season by not waiting until Memorial Day), I chose a new color for my toes — Essie's "Over the Top." Last summer was silver (Essie's "Loophole"); this spring/summer I have chosen a shade that is somewhere between navy, gray, silver and black. I have not worn polish on my toes since Labor Day, so each time I see my feet I still think, "wow, whose toes are those?!"

Maple Sugar Candy

I was at the Union Square Green Market this afternoon with my friend Richie, and while he was off buying purple potatoes from Peru, I discovered the Deep Mountain Maple booth and bought a little rock of maple sugar candy, rather spontaneously.

When I was rather small (ages 4-8), we lived in upstate New York. Maple sugaring was something that happened all around the area in the early spring. Consequently, fresh maple syrup was everywhere (although, we of course only ate Aunt Jemima syrup, being that it was the 80s and everything we ate or drank was processed and usually only four letters, or less, long — Tang, Jif, Ho-Hos, Tab, etc.). However, I remember eating maple syrup candy pressed into little cakes shaped like maple leaves. My mom would keep my leaf in the kitchen cupboard and every time I wanted a bite, she would bring it out for me, so I could take a bite and get dizzy from the immediate sugar explosion in my brain.

Deep Mountain Maple would never do anything as commercial as make maple leaf shaped candy — apparently, that is only for airport gift shops. Instead, there is a jar of nuggets, and using tongs, you reach in and grab whichever rock looks like the size of sugar you want to ingest, and then you put it on the scale. My nugget came to 50¢. I then proceeded to get jolted back to childhood with the most extreme sugar high, as I nibbled on my rock waiting for Richie to pay for his tubers.

Fly

Today, I did not answer my phone at work, nor did I answer any emails — unless they were urgent. I had to get something finished for a presentation the next morning, and I knew it was going to require an anthem…so I picked "Fly" by Sugar Ray and Super Cat. And then proceeded to listen to it on repeat, non-stop for the next 14 straight hours. Which is the secret trick to getting work done. You pick an anthem and only listen to that one song, over and over again. It becomes your mantra, and you can seriously get into a meditative work state where you are so super focused on what you are doing, that everything else is blocked out. It sounds insane, but I am serious, it totally works. That plus, dark chocolate peanut M+Ms.

Perfect hardboiled eggs

Some J.Crew love

So I feel like I have to say this slightly embarrassedly (lest I come across like the biggest loser with no life), but flipping through the J.Crew catalog makes me really happy. And ok, so I have also been known to devotedly watch the "making of the catalog" videos on You Tube, like this Paris video, and this holiday video (which I already posted about).

Whenever the catalog arrives in the mail, I immediately look through it and then neatly rip out the pages of all of the things I want to buy (for instance the green patent leather heels above are practically begging my name) and then I go online and stick everything in my shopping basket. Usually, I manage to then close the Safari window before I go find my wallet; sort of like window shopping. Or sometimes my computer crashes and saves me from buying a matching set of luggage…

which is handcrafted in Italy at a luxury leather house that's been around for almost 200 years, and frequented by Milan's nobility. But other times, I have been known to order three party dresses in multiple colors because they were on sale! Or else order a dress via overnight delivery for my brother's wedding, because I forgot that by being related to the groom, I actually had to look presentable and therefore not kooky in a Lisa Loeb-like kind of way. Oh, and silver heels and a matching silver clutch-style handbag, while I was at it. Because nothing in my closet was really all that suitable.

Honestly, for the past 22 years, J.Crew has rarely, if ever let me down. Ok, there were a few misses, like the jean jacket in high school that was always too denim-y in color; which made me look like biggest nerd then, and now would be super hip. And the pea jacket whose pockets wore out within the season, and when they sent me a new one, it did not fit at all like my previous one and I was totally bummed. But otherwise, my entire high-school and college career could be mapped by my J.Crew memories. The pink striped rugby shirt that I wore for my ninth grade school picture; the striped turtleneck I wore when I had my first kiss; the list could go on forever.

There have even been days when my entire outfit: shoes, socks, underwear, jeans, tank top, teeshirt, sweater, coat, hat, mittens, scarf and book bag were all from J.Crew. And I am not at all ashamed by this, oddly enough.

Help the honey bees!

I was reading the most recent issue of Martha Stewart Living this evening and came across the Häagen-Dazs Loves Honey Bees campaign — in recognition of our reliance on honey bees for food (bees pollinate 1/3 of all of the food we eat), Häagen-Dazs is donating money to help fund honey bee research. Because over 25% of the western honey bee population has disappeared over the past few years, due to an disturbing phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder. Which is basically when bees leave their nests for no good reason, and then die.

Anyway, I love the website for the campaign, which has a very nice soundtrack of bees buzzing and it really sounds like how my grandparents' and great uncle's fruit farms used to sound in the summer time. My great uncle kept honey bees to pollinate his fruit trees, and he used to bring them over to pollinate my grandpa's fruit trees as well. And while I never really liked the bees when I was young — they buzzed way too much — it was only much later did I really appreciate how cool it was that my great uncle kept his own bees.

Fast forward to a few years ago, when I fell in love with honey — how it tasted, how it smelled, honeycomb on challah; basically, everything about honey started to delight me. And since then, I have always searched out new types of honey, made from different flowers, from different parts of the world. If you live in Brooklyn, I urge you to check out The Brooklyn Bee honey, made by honey bees living on the roof of John Howe's brownstone in Fort Greene. I bought a jar at Habana Outpost two years ago. While it might not be the best honey I have ever had, I feel good knowing that I am eating honey produced locally, by Fort Greene bees.

Ronaldinho's feet

Kenny showed me some videos on You Tube over dinner this evening. One was a Nike "viral" video of Ronaldinho wearing some new cleats that arrived in a little gold suitcase. I have never really had much of an interest in soccer, because I just stuck it into the boring sports category. But I think (much like how Friday Night Lights changed my whole perception on American football) that this has changed after watching these two videos of Ronaldinho. Check it out and see if you suddenly are completely, and utterly, blown away by his foot work.



and another one:

Plastic bag triangles

I saw this video on my friend Elizabeth's blog, and thought it was great. It shows you how you can take a regular plastic shopping bag (Which soon, will no longer be an issue if you shop at Whole Foods — as they are fully moving to paper bags on April 22, which is World Earth Day.) and fold it into the little, tidy triangle. So you will no longer have a wild mess of plastic bags hibernating in your kitchen cupboard.

ohm-ing

This morning at my yoga class we ended with a mini breathing meditation and then two minutes of ohm-ing, where everyone was supposed to ohm at their own pace. I have some serious hangups about my ohms, as I feel that I am not really very harmonious yet. At all. So I thought to myself, "well, okay, maybe I just won't ohm then. I can ohm internally…" But the woman next to me was splendid at her ohm-ing and I matched my ohms to hers. And then I suddenly did not care anymore, and ohm-ed on my own. And it was like the sound was just welling out of my body uncontrollably, in the most marvelous way.

We then were able to continue sitting in a meditative pose, or else lay down in shavasana. I chose to remain seated, and for the next ten minutes, quietly meditated. I focused on the fact that my body was still humming, literally, from the two minutes of ohm-ing, and I decided to lose myself into that internal vibration. First, I could feel my skin humming. And then my muscles. And then my internal organs. My heart was humming, and lastly, my brain was feeling it, as well. It was like a very intense fountain of light was pulsing through every fiber of my being. It was pretty incredible. My right foot managed to fall asleep amidst the hummingness, but I did not even notice until I went to stand up and almost fell over.

It was an amazing feeling, and has convinced me that I ought to try a home meditation practice. Those ten minutes made me feel both so intensely connected to my inner self, and so disconnected from life around me. It was as if I was delightedly lost inside of my own body and mind.

Chipotle, with its bad ass

It seems like the Chipotle (a "Mexican" fast food chain of restaurants) on Seventh Avenue commissioned a graffiti'ed mural on the side of its restaurant. At first, I wondered if someone just did it to be funny, but it is a little too matchy to be a non-sponsered thing. Regardless, I love it. Even if I do find the food at Chipotle to be a little boring.

There have been some other postings about the mural, here and here.

Spring has sprung

Spring is finally here! All of the trees in the city are blooming and the air smells so delicious. Which is hard to believe in New York, I understand. Smell fast, as the spring smell only last like a week, and then its suddenly the stink and funk of summertime in New York. There is something about the warmer weather that just makes me want to run around; the sunshine and warmer temperatures literally imbue me with such a tremendous amount of energy and delight. Making me realize, once again, that the winter season just wholly depresses me. It makes me fat, lethargic and crabby. So I either need to move somewhere were there is not such a gray and chilly winter, or else buy one of those fake sunlight lamps.

Swedish Design

Today I was looking at two websites for some inspiration while at work; as usual, I turned to the work of Susanna and Henrik, two designers whom I look up to incredibly. Susanna was the senior designer at Liska + Associates when I first starting working there in 1997, and then she managed the office when Marcos left to start TODA. Susanna was a meticulous designer and only expected the best work from everyone…I learned an immense amount about design from her. Partly because I was scared I would look like an idiot; because she would often refer to the work some person (usually a really famous designer whom I had never heard of), and I would have to go and research them just so I knew whom she was talking about — and partly because she knows how to, literally, pull the best work out of everyone she works with. Susanna then moved to Sweden to marry Henrik, whom she met at the Yale program in Basel, Switzerland. And I still am unable to think of a more beautiful couple, with regards to design and how they approach life.

Anyway, whenever I am feeling lackluster in the design department and deeply missing Susanna, I look at their work (Susanna works at BVD and Henrik has his own studio) to get inspired. Clean, simple and incredibly smart; I could lose myself in their abilities to make something pretty fucking amazing out of negative space. Henrik once told me that he only needed like two different typefaces — ever.

A few projects by BVD…

"There are those who equate design with something arty and extravagant, unnecessary decoration. We don't agree with that. Design is about function, content and depth. Design is a language all of its own that, properly used, can become a precise and enormously powerful communication tailored perfectly to the receiver. Furthermore, design is an integral part of branding…

If the culture, values and business concept of a brand can be said to be its soul, then design is its body. Design is what gives a brand its physical form, in everything from the logo, typography and imagery, to systems for packaging design, advertising and entire store environments.

Of course, design on its own is not enough. A brand has to be honest and credible, and it naturally has to offer something people want. But then design is needed to express and make all of this apparent.

Studies show that companies which understand the importance of seeing design from a strategic perspective, are more profitable than companies which do not. And everything suggests that the importance of design is growing, because parallel t the increasing need of strong brands, peoples' interest in design is also growing. Today's consumers are conscious, demanding good design for everything form toilet brushes to noodle packaging.

Some work done by Henrik.

I heart iogami

Oh. My. God. I have been mourning the loss of iogami, for like nine straight years. After io360 closed up, and Casey Reas went to MIT, I figured that I would never ever see this little program again. But tonight, I stumbled upon it, and I cannot tell you how overjoyed I am to see this again. Its like I found a long lost friend!

What is Green?

I am LOVING Design Within Reach's new 'What is Green' catalog. First of all, despite catalogs themselves not being not very environmentally thoughtful, I love getting catalogs that are true magalogs — I want to learn stuff while I am plunking down lots of money for more consumer goods. And I miss working as print designer, at times. 

Nice to note that this is printed on FSC certified paper. However, I am on their mailing list three times, so it would behoove me to let them know that I am receiving two too many catalogs, if I was truly green-minded.