What I Wanted to be When I Grew Up

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Futures Past – As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? How close or far are you from that vision?

My earliest memory of what I wanted to be when I grew up isn’t really a memory, but something I wrote down in my “My Book About Me” that I (and my Mom) worked on when I was probably about seven years old. I wrote that I wanted to be a Football Player, but I had first written down Astronaut first before crossing that out.

As an older kid (when I was in High School), I started getting into art and design and decided I wanted to go into a field related to that. I remember meeting my guidance counselor and we decided that I should apply to colleges that had good art departments. Then in art school at the university I decided I wanted to work in a museum as a curator. I eventually got a degree in Studio Art (painting) and a minor in Art History, but I really am not into Fine Art. Funny huh? I did work at a museum for a while, as a “Preparator” doing stuff like moving paintings in and out of storage, dusting the sculptures, and getting the galleries ready for opening. I got exposed to that culture, but found out that it really wasn’t for me.

Fast-forward a bit (a lot!) through a few jobs which involved computers, and I was finding myself applying my design/art skills to multimedia presentations and learning and teaching Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. Now I am a full-time designer, working with web and print. So I guess I have kept the path I wanted to keep since High School, and I am pretty happy about that.

This post was prompted by The Daily Post from WordPress.

You’re Seeing it Wrong

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Deer and Kokopelli
Deer and Kokopelli

Have you seen the image on the left before? I see them all the time on pickup truck windows here in Texas. It’s a stylized buck. But for the longest time I thought it was a dance studio logo, or a Kokopelli. I couldn’t figure out why Kokopelli’s were getting popular here… until I finally saw the image of the deer. Ah, the driver of the truck must be a hunter! It’s funny that I’m a visual designer but I sometimes have a hard time seeing what logos actually represent. Take the logo below on the left for instance.

Wolfman Logo vs. My Vision
Wolfman Logo vs. My Vision

When discussing the logo with my friend, he told me quite plainly, “It’s a wolf.” But what I saw was the image on the right (enhanced in Photoshop for explanatory effect). I thought it was a pretty messed-up drawing of a wolf on a rampage. It just swallowed a woman whole and her shoe (in red) got flipped in the air, for goodness sake!

Some days later, I saw the true image of the calm wolf and it made sense. I guess I must have looked at it in a different light, so to speak, or a dim light, or a new angle and the true image made itself clear. (For the record, I love Wolfman Luggage! I have one of their tankbags on my bike.)

It’s kind of like when you are listening to a song that you have heard a thousand times before, but you come into it at a different measure, or the volume is just a little too low to make the song out clearly, and you hear a different melody… or actually it’s the same melody, but with different timing so it sounds like a totally different tune. Has that ever happened to you? Or maybe it’s just me?

The Great Passage / 舟を編む (2013) – Movie Review

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The Great Passage Movie Poster
The Great Passage Movie Poster

As I was looking through the list of recordings on the DVR, I came across “The Great Passage (舟を編む)” on TV Japan which Mariko must have recorded. I saw that it had subtitles so I decided to give it a go, and I am glad I did. It was a great movie, and I was captivated by the characters and story. It’s about a team of editors who are working on a new dictionary called The Great Passage. As you might expect of a story about a dictionary it’s not action-packed, however, the character development is interesting to watch and the acting was superb. The friendship between Majime (Ryuhei Matsuda) and Masashi (Joe Odagiri) is fun to watch (Odagiri is so funny) and the love story was charming, although it was only a sub-plot.

The story is set in Tokyo, starting in the year 1995. They did a good job recreating the style of the era, with accurate clothing and hairstyles. It was very natsukashii for me since I lived there from 1996. I guess that is another reason I really enjoyed the movie. It made me miss Japan and I can’t wait to live there again. But that actually happens so much when I watch Japanese movies or tv. I guess that is why I am addicted to shows that feature everyday life in Japan.

On this relaxing evening, I was in the mood for a movie just like The Great Passage. If you have the means, I highly recommend watching it. Oh, in other news, I just became Aoi Miyazaki‘s biggest fan!

My rating: 8/10

The Great Passage official site

Medium

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I’ve been enjoying visiting Medium and reading people’s short stories. And by short, I mean 2-10 minute reads. There’s actually an indicator for each story of how long it will take to read. How cool is that? Most of the stories are wonderful and thought-provoking, and certainly worth more than the price of admission (free!). I still don’t quite understand the organization of things (who can make a collection, can a story be in more than one collection, etc.), and it is a little difficult to find a certain story through searching. For instance, I was in the middle or reading a story about trail-running when I had to turn off the tablet. Later, I wanted to continue reading that story, but couldn’t find it. The search function didn’t find it either. I guess I need to be more liberal with my bookmarking. But there are so many interesting things to read, I find that my bookmarks list is getting long! (That’s a good thing)

On the downside, I did come across a story was less pure storytelling and more commercial-leaning. It’s a “story” about a nice new backpack and how this brand of backpack is now available in the UK. After a short description of the backpack, with very little practical information (“I’ll be doing a full review in a month or two“), there is a link to the backpack vendor’s store. That’s pretty much it. How did that story get posted? Have I been mistaken about what Medium is about? I decided to check the about page and found, “Medium is a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends. It’s designed for little stories that make your day better and manifestos that change the world.” It was a little strange and disheartening to find something that feels more like an advertisement than a “manifesto that changes the world”. It cheapens Medium. I just hope it’s not the direction Medium is headed, because the trend of personal blogs turning into business blogs saddens me, and I’d hate for Medium to follow that pattern.

This was a little hard for me to write because as some of you may know, I am crazy about bags and backpacks. I just don’t think that ads for them belong at Medium.

To finish up on a positive note, I’d like to recommend a few of the collections I have saved to my list. I hope you enjoy them!

  • The LYD Essays : I’ve followed Ernie Hsiung on the Internet for a few years and was happy to see his stories on Medium. Funny and entertaining.
  • Click the Shutter:  Photography-related stories. Lots of inspiration here.
  • Roaming the Earth: Great for those with wanderlust!

Day Off

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I’m so happy it’s the long weekend! It’s funny that a day off from work that happens every year always seem to creep up and surprise me. This time because of some things at work, I knew that we have Monday off, but still, the free day doesn’t seem to sink in until Saturday comes around. I don’t really have any plans but just the thought of a free day gets me in a good mood. Maybe it’s the anticipation or open possibilities of things that we can do that excite me… even the option of doing nothing but catch up on TV shows is a positive.

In the not-too-distant past I used to have a more negative frame of mind when I have a free day. Maybe not really negative per se, but I would kind of feel like I would be wasting time or missing an opportunity unless I have something planned. These days I like to just enjoy the fact that there is no plan. It’s ok not to have everything worked out in advance!

I think I may have mentioned something like this before regarding vacation planning (more specifically the lack of planning), but now I also like when it happens on a smaller scale, such as just a single day off. It’s a nice change of outlook and the stress reduction is amazing. Life’s too short to be stressed all the time! And taking time off just relaxing and reducing stress it definitely time well-spent!